AMD Radeon R9 290: Gallium3D vs. Catalyst Drivers

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 26 August 2014 at 09:08 AM EDT. Page 2 of 4. 22 Comments.
AMD Radeon R9 290 Open vs. Closed Linux 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.

AMD Radeon R9 290 Open vs. Closed Linux Drivers

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.

AMD Radeon R9 290 Open vs. Closed Linux Drivers

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.

AMD Radeon R9 290 Open vs. Closed Linux Drivers

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.


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