AMD Radeon HD 7950 On Linux: Southern Islands Isn't Yet A Penguin Holiday

The first Linux game that was used is the open-source Xonotic, which is the popular fork to Nexuiz and powered by the DarkPlaces engine. With Xonotic 0.5, the Radeon HD 7950 was 17% faster than the Radeon HD 6950, but again, the XFX Radeon HD 7950 was set by the factory to run at 900/1375MHz rather than 800/1250MHz as AMD's reference speeds. These speeds could not be changed on the Radeon HD 7950 under Linux at this time since the driver still defines the GPU as being "unsupported hardware" and artificially imposes this amdconfig utility limitation.

Warsow is another popular open-source game, but with any recent graphics card using the binary graphics driver it is more than sufficient to run the Qfusion-based game. The Radeon HD 7950 is obviously not an issue at all for this Linux-native game, even if it would be running at its 4K resolution.

To finally torture the Radeon HD 7950 graphics processor is Unigine Heaven with its GL3/GL4 renderer, which is by far the most demanding OpenGL workload available under Linux at this point. First up are some Unigine Heaven 2.1 benchmarks followed by Unigine Heaven 3.0, which was publicly released towards the end of this Radeon HD 7950 benchmarking process.