Running The AMD Radeon R9 Fury With AMD's New Open-Source Linux Driver

This round of open-source AMD Linux testing was done from an Intel Core i5 6600K Skylake system. The system had Ubuntu 15.04 x86_64 with the Xfce desktop while upgraded to the Linux 4.2 + DRM-Next kernel (the 4.3 Radeon/AMDGPU code), X.Org Server 1.17.1, xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-amdgpu Git from this week, Mesa 11.1-devel Git from yesterday, and LLVM 3.8.0 SVN. Basically, all of the very latest open-source code as it pertains to graphics testing.

Besides running benchmarks on the Sapphire Radeon R9 Fury graphics card, I also re-tested the Radeon R9 285 (Tonga) GPU from this latest AMDGPU stack too. Other tested AMD GCN GPUs using the mature Radeon DRM driver were the Radeon HD 7950, Radeon R9 290, and Radeon R7 370. As a reminder, the R9 Fury and R9 285 have no re-clocking support via the AMDGPU driver while the other hardware is on the "Radeon" DRM driver with full performance capabilities.

Only the latest open-source driver code was tested for this article while coming up tomorrow I plan to publish some results for all of these GPUs compared to the latest Catalyst driver for a modern open vs. closed-source driver comparison.

All of the OpenGL benchmarks run for this testing were done using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.