AMD Made OpenCL A Bit Faster This Year On Linux

To be published on Thursday and Friday of this week is the annual "year in review" articles for the AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers. While those articles are looking at the OpenGL performance for all driver releases made in the past year, some OpenCL benchmarks were also conducted.

Posted here are some AMD OpenCL performance benchmarks for all of the official AMD Catalyst Linux graphics driver releases going back to Catalyst 11.12 from last December. The OpenCL benchmarks were done at the same time as doing the more thorough OpenGL Year-In-Review testing. There's also NVIDIA OpenCL performance benchmarks for the past year to be published in another article shortly.

The OpenCL/OpenGL testing was done from an AMD Radeon HD 6950 "Cayman" graphics card on an Intel Core i7 3770K "Ivy Bridge" system running Ubuntu 11.10 (in order to have Linux kernel and xorg-server compatibility for all Catalyst driver releases made in the past year).

For two of the Luxmark OpenCL benchmarks, the OpenCL performance on the Radeon HD 6950 improved with Catalyst 12.10 and the GPGPU performance boost remained with the latest Catalyst 12.11 Beta.

For the third OpenCL test, there was no change in performance.

Stay tuned for the AMD 2012 Year-In-Review article tomorrow.