8-Way AMD Gallium3D vs. Catalyst Ubuntu GPU Benchmarks

While I'm now onto benchmarking several new NVIDIA graphics cards under Linux and also the AMD Radeon R9 290, earlier this week I ran some more open-source vs. closed-source driver benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux. Here's fresh benchmark results when comparing eight AMD Radeon graphics cards on the open (Gallium3D) and closed-source (Catalyst) drivers and running various Linux OpenGL workloads.

This testing isn't too different from other open vs. closed-source GPU driver benchmarks run recently on Phoronix but is a fresh look and with some different tests. The Catalyst driver in use was the latest publicly available (Catalyst 13.11 Beta 6 - OpenGL 4.3.12614 - fglrx 13.25.5) and the open-source version was Mesa 10.0-devel with an xf86-video-ati Git snapshot. The Linux 3.12 kernel was used throughout all testing and DPM was enabled for the Radeon Linux driver.

The graphics cards tested for this latest article include the AMD Radeon HD 5830, HD 6450, HD 6770, HD 6870, HD 6950, HD 7850, HD 7950, and R9 270X. The Radeon R9 270X is a new addition since the last AMD open vs. closed Linux tests at Phoronix. The size of this comparison was limited based upon available hardware and in having to purchase the recent generations of GPUs for benchmarking at Phoronix since AMD hasn't been cooperating with review samples. If you appreciate the work done in delivering this exclusive Linux content please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium or making a PayPal contribution. I bought the Radeon R9 290 this week, and there's brand new AMD Hawaii open-source code, but it isn't yet baked and 2D/3D hardware acceleration is disabled by default so that GPU wasn't tested for this article.

All benchmarking was handled by the Phoronix Test Suite. For those just interested in seeing Valve Source Engine game benchmarks, see the 13-way AMD Open-Source Linux Source Engine results I did a few days ago.