AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D Is Improving, But Catalyst Is Much Better

AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D Is Improving, But Catalyst Is Much Better: After last week delivering a Linux hardware review of the AMD Radeon R9 270X graphics card with the binary Catalyst driver on Ubuntu, and then yesterday looking at the Radeon Gallium3D driver posing a threat to Catalyst when using the mature "R600g" driver on HD 5000/600 series hardware, up today are new open vs. closed-source benchmarks. In this article we're looking at the performance of the Radeon R9 270X GPU when using the Ubuntu 13.10 open-source graphics stack, then when upgrading to Mesa 10.0 with Linux 3.12 DPM, and then comparing those numbers to the proprietary Catalyst Linux graphics driver.