Preview Of AMD Radeon R9 290 Hawaii Open-Source Performance

With the Linux 3.17 kernel, the latest Hawaii microcode files, and the newest Mesa code, the Radeon R9 290 series graphics cards should finally be working well on the open-source driver. Here's some preview results with the latest open-source driver.

Coming up next week is a comparison of the Radeon R9 290 graphics card against various other graphics cards on the latest open-source driver. Additionally, there will be a RadeonSI Gallium3D vs. Catalyst driver comparison for the Radeon R9 290 graphics card. Unfortunately there will be no Radeon R9 290X graphics tests for lacking that GPU and having bought the R9 290 myself. For those that are anxious to see how the R9 290 performs on the open-source driver, I uploaded some initial standalone results this weekend for you to facilitate your own comparisons.

You can find a lot of the initial Radeon R9 290 results using Mesa 10.3 and the Linux 3.17 kernel via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. There's a wide-range of tests in that article for the R9 290 Hawaii GPU. If you wish to see how your own Linux system's graphics performance compares to this setup, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and then run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1408235-KH-RADEONR9272. It's that easy to carry out the tests in a fully-standardized and automated manner from downloading the tests to setting them up in the same way and then finally executing the tests and analyzing the results. If you upload your results to OpenBenchmarking.org, be sure to share the URL with other Phoronix readers in our forums.

Stay tuned for our official Mesa 10.3 + Linux 3.17 Hawaii results on Phoronix next week.