AMD Catalyst 14.4 Brings Few Linux Performance Improvements

Starting off with Valve's Half-Life 2: Lost Coast game, there was no measurable change in performance between the two tested Catalyst Linux driver releases for the four graphics cards that were tested.

With the defunct open-source Nexuiz game, the performance was also about the same but the HD 6950 and R9 290 seemed to be edging ever so slightly higher with the new Catalyst 14.4 Linux release.

With the rather basic OpenArena game we have the first indications of improved performance with the new Catalyst 14.4 Linux graphics driver. All four graphics cards were faster with the new driver release; the Radeon R9 290 was about 7% faster, the R9 270X about 9% faster, the HD 7950 about 7% faster, and the HD 6950 was 6% faster.