AMD's Latest Open-Source Driver On Linux Is Getting Competitive With Catalyst 15.7

With Counter-Strike: Global Offensive at 1080p, the open-source driver was actually ahead of Catalyst 15.7 for the Radeon HD 6870! The HD 6870 has very mature open-source support and the only other pre-GCN graphics card tested was the HD 6950 Cayman, which has never been well optimized under the open-source driver. The CS:GO results for the various GCN graphics cards tested were quite positive and for the Radeon R9 290 the open-source performance even was approaching the speed of Catalyst.

For kicks, there's the OpenArena results... Overall the open-source driver on the HD 7000 series and newer GCN GPUs still has a bit more than half the performance of Catalyst.

Team Fortress 2 on the tested graphics cards did deliver a playable experience on Linux 4.1 with Mesa 10.7-devel, but this largely CPU-bound game remained much faster on Catalyst 15.7 while delivering comparable image quality.