11-Way AMD Radeon GPU Comparison On Linux 3.12, Mesa 9.3
After last week delivering new AMD Radeon HD 7000 Gallium3D benchmarks from the Mesa 9.3 development driver and the Linux 3.12 Git kernel, up today is a much larger open-source AMD Radeon graphics comparison using the latest code that's yet to be officially released. From the Linux 3.12 kernel and Mesa 9.3-devel, eleven different AMD Radeon graphics cards spanning multiple generations were compared with the latest open-source Linux graphics driver code.
This 11-way comparison happened from the Linux 3.12-rc1 kernel with Radeon DPM (Dynamic Power Management) being enabled, xf86-video-ati 7.2.99, and Mesa 9.3-devel git-a1b6e69 while the rest of the stack was running Ubuntu 13.04 with the Xfce 4.10 desktop. Swap buffers wait, as always, was disabled within the Radeon DDX during testing. Aside from enabling Radeon DPM on Linux 3.12, it was a rather stock setup similar to most Linux desktop users will experience when running these new Linux desktop packages.
The graphics cards being tested today included the:
- AMD Radeon HD 4550
- AMD Radeon HD 4830
- AMD Radeon HD 4850
- AMD Radeon HD 4890
- AMD Radeon HD 5450
- AMD Radeon HD 5830
- AMD Radeon HD 6450
- AMD Radeon HD 6570
- AMD Radeon HD 6770
- AMD Radeon HD 6950
- AMD Radeon HD 7850
The selection of graphics cards used was mostly around having a diverse selection of modern GPUs, based upon our hardware availability, and not having many HD 7000 series graphics cards plus the fact that the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver is very buggy. All software and system settings remained the same throughout testing aside from swapping out the different GPUs. All benchmarking was handled via the Phoronix Test Suite.
There's the rundown of all the system software/hardware details once more. You can compare your own system's performance against the results in this article with the Phoronix Test Suite by running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1309196-SO-LINUX312M56 to run your own fully-automated Linux OpenGL performance comparison.