The Most Comprehensive AMD Radeon Linux Graphics Comparison

Unfortunately, the Radeon HD 6000 series support has regressed in the Linux 3.1 development kernel as of the end of August when this testing began. The Radeon HD 6000 series was working for a while fine, but with the Git code being used, it was unstable. Northern Islands hardware would experience many soft-resets when running various OpenGL tests. The Cayman hardware was especially bad.

Many times there would be a soft-reset when the graphics processor would hang, but eventually all of the GPUs would hit an issue and be unable to recover.

When some of the OpenGL games did run for short periods of time between hangs, some of the OpenGL rendering would be incorrect.

The Radeon HD 6000 series has regressed badly with Linux 3.1, which may be fixed by the official release. However, for this testing, it means that on the open-source side not all of the Northern Islands / Cayman results are available due to these Radeon failures. Toggling color tiling and swap buffers wait did not improve the situation.