OpenGL Performance & Perf-Per-Watt From The Radeon HD 3850 Through R9 Fury

Xonotic is an open-source classic and still is able to show some performance scaling to modern GPUs even without leveraging any modern GL extensions. Going from the Radeon HD 4870 (RV770) to Radeon R9 Fury or R9 290 represents a nearly three fold improvement. For reminding, the Radeon HD 4000 series was introduced in 2008.

The performance-per-Watt results for Xonotic across this wide-range of ATI/AMD hardware is even more stunning.

Tesseract is another open-source game relying upon OpenGL 2/3 that's able to still scale to modern hardware, albeit more than what's relevant for gamers just trying to ensure a playable experience. Here going from the Radeon HD 4870 to R9 Fury is more than five times faster, similar to the R9 290. It will be interesting to see how Polaris fits into the mix.

The performance-per-Watt improvements are also very profound.