AMD's RadeonSI Driver Sped Up A Lot This Summer

Unigine Heaven was almost 10% faster over the Mesa 10.3-dev Oibaf PPA state thanks to Linux 3.16 and HyperZ. The last few tests in this article wouldn't even run out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 14.04 with the RadeonSI driver due to Mesa 10.1 / LLVM 3.3 AMD GPU issues.

Xonotic with the maxed out image quality settings continued to see more significant improvements in performance.

For those using the open-source AMD Radeon Linux driver with a GCN graphics card, it's certainly worthwhile updating the software if you're comfortable in doing so... The Oibaf PPA is recommended, toggling HyperZ is easy, and there's also the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA for getting a newer kernel in Debian package form. For the conservative users sticking to the Ubuntu archive, at least you have something to look forward to with Ubuntu 14.10.

Coming up in the next few days are even some other more exciting Linux GPU tests. If you appreciate all of the Linux hardware testing, please make a contribution or join Phoronix Premium.