Radeon Linux Benchmarks: Catalyst 15.3 Beta vs. Linux 4.0 + Mesa 10.6-devel

Before ending out March, here's some new OpenGL Linux benchmarks comparing the closed-source Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver against the Linux 4.0 development kernel with Mesa 10.6 Git for the freshest open-source graphics driver code.

These benchmarks are very straightforward and comparing an Ubuntu 15.04 64-bit system running the Catalyst 15.3 Beta (as packaged for Ubuntu Vivid) against the Ubuntu 15.04 installation then upgrading to the Linux 4.0 Git kernel and Mesa 10.6-devel (using the Oibaf PPA to also provide the updated xf86-video-ati DDX in an easy and simple-to-reproduce manner). The graphics cards for this latest round of benchmarking were the Radeon HD 6870 (representing the R600 Gallium3D driver) and then the RadeonSI driver based HD 7850, R9 270X, and R9 290 graphics cards.

All the benchmarks in this article were facilitated in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.