The Most Energy Efficient Radeon GPU For AMD Linux Gaming

In continuation of yesterday's 20-Way Radeon Comparison With Open-Source Graphics For Steam On Linux Gaming, here's a look at the most (and least) energy efficient Radeon GPUs when running Steam games on Linux along with other OpenGL tests while using the very latest open-source graphics drivers.

The same group of AMD Radeon GPUs from yesterday was used for this round of testing but rather than just focusing upon the raw OpenGL performance we're primarily focusing on the power consumption, performance-per-Watt, and thermal data for this large group of Radeon graphics processors that span several generations. Again, the wide array of Radeon hardware for testing included the:

Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 4670 512MB
Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 4770 512MB
Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 4830 512MB
AMD Radeon HD 4850 512MB
AMD Radeon HD 4870 512MB
ASUS AMD Radeon HD 4890 1024MB
Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 5450 512MB
AMD Radeon HD 5750 1024MB
AMD Radeon HD 5770 1024MB
Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 5830 1024MB
HIS AMD Radeon HD 6450 1024MB
Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6570 512MB
Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6770 1024MB
Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6870 1024MB
Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6950 2048MB
ASUS AMD Radeon HD 7850 1024MB
XFX AMD Radeon HD 7950 3072MB
Sapphire AMD Radeon R7 260X 2048MB
Gigabyte AMD Radeon R9 270X 2048MB
XFX AMD Radeon R9 290 4096MB

This open-source driver testing was done with the Linux 3.17 Git kernel and Mesa 10.3-devel from the Oibaf PPA. The Core i7 4790K system was running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS x86_64 by default. All benchmarking was done through the Phoronix Test Suite with it automatically reading the AC system power consumption from a WattsUp USB power meter and the GPU temperatures from the exposed driver information when setting the MONITOR=sys.power,gpu.temp environment variable. The games run for this comparison were Counter-Strike: Source, Unigine Tropics, and Xonotic.