Radeon Gallium3D Is Running Increasingly Well Against AMD's Catalyst Driver

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 5 August 2014 at 11:00 AM EDT. Page 1 of 4. 35 Comments.

After last week running new Nouveau vs. NVIDIA proprietary Linux graphics benchmarks, here's the results when putting AMD's hardware on the test bench and running both their latest open and closed-source drivers. Up today are the results of using the latest Radeon Gallium3D graphics code and Linux kernel against the latest beta of the binary-only Catalyst driver.

Similar to the NVIDIA GeForce tests of last week, on the open-source side was the Linux 3.16 kernel with Mesa 10.3-devel and other updated graphics user-space using the Oibaf PPA on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS x86_64. When benchmarking the proprietary Catalyst 14.6 Beta driver from mid-July, we had to pull back to the Linux 3.14 kernel for kernel compatibility with this binary blob release.

The graphics cards tested from this Ubuntu 14.04 setup with the latest open and closed source AMD Radeon graphics drivers included the following:

- Radeon HD 6770 1GB
- Radeon HD 6870 1GB
- Radeon HD 6950 2GB
- Radeon HD 7850 1GB
- Radeon HD 7950 3GB
- Radeon R7 260X 2GB
- Radeon R9 270X 2GB
- Radeon R9 290 4GB

The selection of tested AMD graphics cards were limited to those in my possession. All of the Linux OpenGL benchmarking was facilitated via the Phoronix Test Suite. The results in this article are just looking at the raw OpenGL performance while a follow-up article will incorporate the power consumption/efficiency data.

Radeon Linux 3.16 vs. Catalyst 14.6 Beta Linux

Related Articles