The Linux 3.13 Kernel Is A Must-Have For AMD RadeonSI Users

While the more thorough R600g and RadeonSI tests (outlined on the previous page) will be coming in the days ahead, for this article I simply used an Ubuntu 13.10 x86_64 installation with Mesa 10.1-devel and other Oibaf PPA packages to compare the Ubuntu mainline kernel PPA of 3.12 stable against the Linux 3.13 (near-final) daily kernel as of today. Testing was done "out of the box" through all tests so with Linux 3.13 we have the benefit of Dynamic Power Management, the important shader back-end fix, and the other improvements -- to the Radeon DRM specifically and the overall Linux 3.13 enhancements throughout.

For these AMD Linux 3.13 preview tests a Radeon HD 7950 and Radeon R9 270X. All of this benchmarking was handled via the Phoronix Test Suite software in a wide-range of Linux OpenGL games and other workloads.

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