13-Way Low-End GPU Comparison With AMD's AM1 Athlon
For our latest AM1 platform testing with the Athlon 5350 Kabini APU is comparing its Radeon R3 Graphics against an assortment of discrete NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards while running Ubuntu 14.04 Linux. For this comparison there's thirteen graphics processors being compared with the latest Linux GPU drivers.
We have delivered many benchmarks of the Radeon R3 Graphics found on the four socketed Kabini APUs launched nearly two weeks ago, but today's tests are the first time we have compared the Kabini APUs under Linux against any discrete GPUs. This has been one of the most frequent test request since we began our AMD AM1 Linux adventures. Our early AM1 Radeon R3 Graphics testing is mostly focused within our RadeonSI Gallium3D vs. Catalyst driver comparison and in looking at whether the AMD Athlon/Semprons are fast enough for Steam on Linux using Source Engine games.
In the article today we used six AMD Radeon graphics cards and seven NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards while comparing them against the Radeon R3 integrated graphics of the Athlon 5350. The motherboard we are using for this article is the ASRock AM1H-ITX that sports a PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot but with all of these AM1 motherboards the PCI-E x16 slot is limited to PCI Express x4 bandwidth. The graphics cards were mostly lower-end to mid-range models and included the:
- AMD Radeon HD 5450
- AMD Radeon HD 6450
- AMD Radeon HD 6570
- AMD Radeon HD 6770
- AMD Radeon HD 8400 (what's advertised within the OS; it's the Radeon R3 integrated graphics of the Athlon 5350 APU)
- AMD Radeon R7 260X
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 220
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 240
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 520
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 610
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760
For all of these GPU tests today we used the binary Linux graphics drivers: Catalyst (fglrx 13.35.5 / OpenGL 4.3.12798) and NVIDIA 334.21. All benchmarking was handled via the Phoronix Test Suite open-source benchmarking software. Now let's see how these graphics cards compare to the Athlon 5350 Radeon R3 performance under Ubuntu 14.04 Linux with a variety of OpenGL games, including popular Source Engine titles.