Sapphire Radeon R7 260X: A Great Linux Graphics Card

When using the Catalyst Linux driver (fglrx 13.25.5 / OpenGL 4.3.12618) with the Radeon R7 260X graphics card the Sapphire Radeon R7 260X was running fine on Ubuntu Linux without any hardware issues.

The Radeon R7 260X will also work with the latest open-source Radeon driver; ideally the Linux 3.13 kernel (or Linux 3.14 with full CIK DPM support) and the Git code of the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for best support. In this article the testing is being done with the Catalyst Linux graphics driver while in a follow-up article will be tests from the open-source AMD Linux driver.

The benchmarking for this review happened from Ubuntu 14.04 while running the Linux 3.13 kernel and Unity 7 desktop. Benchmarking happened from the AMD A10-7850K "Kaveri" system. The tested graphics cards on the Catalyst driver included the AMD Radeon R7 graphics found with the A10-7850K Kaveri APU and then the discrete Radeon HD 6770, HD 6870, HD 6950, HD 7850, and R9 270X hardware as comparison. On the NVIDIA side with the NVIDIA 331.38 Linux graphics driver was the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, GT 610, GTX 650, and GTX 760.

All benchmarking was handled via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software and results hosted on OpenBenchmarking.org for collaborative purposes and so you can run your own cross-comparisons against these results or further validate our results. To see how your system compares to the selection of NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards tested on the A10-7850K-based system, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and then run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1401297-PL-AMDRADEON49 for a fully automated comparison from test downloading and setup to execution and result analysis.