Intel vs. Radeon vs. Nouveau On Linux 3.15 + Mesa 10.3-devel

At the end of the day, the findings we have to share at this time come down to:

- Right now there's some new problems with Linux 3.15 for the Radeon and Nouveau drivers. The newer AMD hardware is causing problems in select OpenGL games but it looks like the upstream developers have a feel for the problem and the GCN hardware should be in good shape in time for the official 3.15 release in the coming weeks. There's still very common Nouveau problems with various GeForce graphics cards.

- Nouveau still lacking re-clocking support means that the OpenGL Linux gaming performance for this hardware is quite poor and thus really not a recommended choice for most Linux desktop users and especially gamers. For now you're really better off with other hardware or using the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver if you care about a stable and useful experience.

- The AMD Radeon open-source graphics support continues to advance. One minor item to point out is that the HD 6900 series Cayman support is still not as well off as the HD 6800 series, if you're looking at buying one of these older pre-GCN graphics cards.

- AMD will be landing more performance-oriented patches with the Linux 3.16 kernel and there's still some other potential optimizations yet to be mainlined, along with using some non-default environment variable tweaks, for those wishing to squeeze every last frame out of the hardware.

More performance tests are now on the way to compare the performance to the proprietary AMD/NVIDIA graphics drivers and following that to run some performance tests against the latest Microsoft Windows 8.1 graphics drivers on the same hardware. If you appreciate all of this time-consuming, resource-intensive testing done at Phoronix on a daily basis, please subscribe to Phoronix Premium, consider a PayPal tip, or at the very least disable AdBlock when viewing our articles. Thanks!