AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D Performance For 4K Linux Gaming

When hitting Xonotic with ultimate image quality settings, the Radeon HD 7850 performance turned out to be disastrous with the Linux 3.17 kernel and Mesa 10.4-devel. There's either some HD 7850 specific re-clocking issue that was triggered by Xonotic (similar situation has been seen with the R9 290 with certain OpenGL workloads triggering different Radeon DPM oddities) or some other issue was adversely affecting its 4K UHD Linux gaming performance. The Radeon R9 290 performance also continued running very low while the HD 7950 / R9 270X came in at just under 60 FPS.

Lastly with Unigine Tropics, the Radeon HD 7850 performance returned to being in line with expectations while the R9 290 Hawaii performance was still problematic. But hey, at least there's finally working open-source Hawaii driver support!

While there's still improvements to be desired within the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver stack and Radeon DRM kernel component, at least with the higher-end GPUs the result was actually quite decent for running at the UHD 4K resolution. The open-source AMD Linux stack was also playing fine with this 4K setup whereas the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver failed to even mode-set at 3840 x 2160.

Coming up next week will be some open vs. closed source AMD Linux performance numbers for this 4K Linux gaming experience.