AMD Radeon R9 290: Still Not Good For Linux Users

When reviewing the AMD Radeon R9 290 under Linux back in November we found the Catalyst Linux performance to be quite poor for this high-end "Hawaii" graphics processor compared to the pleasurable performance reports under Windows and a strong showing against NVIDIA's wares. Even with succeeding updates we still found the R9 290 Linux performance to be poor -- and that's for the high-performance Catalyst driver over the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D-based driver. In this article are fresh benchmarks of the high-end NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards from Ubuntu Linux using the latest beta graphics drivers.

On the AMD side was the Catalyst 14.1 Beta while testing the Radeon HD 7850, HD 7950, R7 260X, R9 270X, and R9 290 graphics cards. On the NVIDIA side was the 334.16 Linux Beta while running the GeForce GTX 680, GTX 760, GTX 770, and GTX 780 Ti graphics cards. All benchmarking happened from an Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" system running Ubuntu 13.10 x86_64 with the mainline Linux 3.12 kernel. More benchmarks will be coming next week with a new and very interesting Linux hardware review. With that article is the full onslaught of the NVIDIA/AMD Linux testing I've been doing over the past few days, including with thermal and power consumption measurements. All benchmarking was done via the Phoronix Test Suite.

If you want to benchmark your own system's performance against these high-end AMD / NVIDIA GPUs on Ubuntu Linux, after installing the Phoronix Test Suite it's just a matter of running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1402151-PL-AMDNVLINU86.