AMD Radeon Graphics Performance With The Linux 3.19 Kernel

With the Linux 3.19 kernel stabilizing nicely, here's a first look at the open-source AMD Radeon graphics performance using this new kernel that will be officially released in the weeks ahead. The Linux 3.18 kernel was compared to the latest Git code of Linux 3.19 for several different AMD Radeon HD series and Rx 200 series graphics cards.

Linux 3.19 adds many new features to the kernel and with that is a ton of Radeon DRM graphics driver updates. Besides merging the AMDKFD HSA driver, the Radeon DRM changes include DPM fan control support, TTM optimizations, and other fixes/improvements.

In looking to see whether the OpenGL performance has shifted at all when using the Linux 3.19 kernel with AMD open-source graphics, I compared 3.18.0 stable to 3.19 Git as of this week. The test system was running Ubuntu 14.10 x86_64 and was upgraded to running Mesa 10.5-devel Git master, LLVM 3.6 SVN, and xf86-video-ati 7.5.99. The few graphics cards I tested for this 3.19 kernel comparison were the Radeon HD 6870, Radeon HD 7850, Radeon R9 270X, and Radeon R9 290 for a mix of old and new graphics hardware.

As always, the OpenGL benchmarks were carried out using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. Similar Linux 3.19 tests with the Intel and Nouveau/NVIDIA graphics will be published in separate Phoronix articles in the days ahead.