Ubuntu 14.04 vs. 16.04 LTS AMD FirePro Performance On Open-Source

As some complementary data to this week's Radeon Gallium3D OpenGL Performance From Fedora 18 To Fedora 23 and the earlier Ubuntu 6.06 LTS to 16.04 LTS benchmarks is a look at the Ubuntu 14.04 vs. 16.04 (in its current development state) performance with an AMD FirePro graphics card.

Just as another extra data point to toss out there this weekend for those sticking to Ubuntu LTS bases (such as Linux Mint users), here's a look at how the performance has evolved over the past two years for this Cayman-derived graphics card. However, don't put too much weight into the results as while they are now on LLVM 3.8 SVN with Mesa 11.1.2, Mesa 11.2 will still hopefully end up landing in time for the April release of Ubuntu 16.04. They though are now using the Linux 4.4 kernel for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, which is expected to be the major version shipping with the Xenial Xerus as there isn't enough time for them to stabilize Linux 4.5.

The tests with the FirePro V7900 were done on the same system and during testing was using the stock open-source driver stack. Ubuntu 16.04 was tested twice due to the just-landed Mesa 11.1.2 with LLVM 3.8 compared to Mesa 11.1.1 with LLVM 3.6.



If you are curious about the performance of this FirePro graphics card between Ubuntu 14.04 and the current 16.04 state, go to this OpenBenchmarking.org result file for the results and more information.