AMD Radeon R9 290: Gallium3D vs. Catalyst Drivers
With OpenArena and the other first few tests, as shown by yesterday's results, is there the Radeon R9 290 on the open-source driver were running faster than the other graphics cards tested... But after a certain point, the re-clocking breaks or other issues cause the GPU to run severely slow. With OpenArena being one of the tests where things were working right, the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver was running at 66% the speed of the Catalyst Linux driver.
OpenArena is the most basic test run in this article and on the open-source driver saw an average frame-rate at 2560 x 1600 at just below 160 FPS.
With the open-source Tesseract game the performance of RadeonSI Gallium3D for the R9 290 Hawaii GPU came in also at about 66% the speed of the proprietary Catalyst driver.
With Unigine Heaven is where the performance of the Radeon R9 290 on the open-source driver went awry -- due to broken re-clocking or some other issue. With this demanding OpenGL benchmark the R9 290 was running at 29% the performance of Catalyst when using the latest open-source Linux code.