2014 Catalyst Linux Graphics Benchmarks Year-In-Review

First up was the most basic OpenGL Linux game test... OpenArena. With OpenArena on the three official Catalyst Linux releases of 2014, there wasn't any major change with the HD 6870 or R9 270X graphics cards but if anything they slowed down a bit past the Catalyst 14.4 driver. For the Radeon R9 290 Hawaii graphics card, however, the performance rose. Catalyst 14.12 was 19% faster with Catalyst 14.12 than it was with Catalyst 14.4.

With the Tesseract game, the HD 6870 and R9 270X seem to regress on this system when using Catalyst 14.12. With the Radeon R9 290, the performance is slightly up over the course of 2014.

With Unigine Sanctuary there's clear performance regressions for the Radeon HD 6870 and R9 270X with the latest Catalyst driver. The Radeon R9 290 was also affected but at least its regressed performance still comes out a few frames ahead of the Catalyst 14.4 driver.