The Most Comprehensive AMD Radeon Linux Graphics Comparison

Using the Phoronix Test Suite, a variety of OpenGL tests were run on each of the graphics cards and with both the open and closed-source drivers. Of course, for the R500 hardware and older, there is no longer any Catalyst support for comparison. Likewise, some of the OpenGL tests used do not work with Mesa so as a result for those tests it's a comparison of the binary Linux driver against the various hardware generations.

These 28 PCI Express graphics cards were tested on an Intel Core i5 2500K "Sandy Bridge" system with a Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra motherboard with 4GB of DDR3 RAM. Ubuntu 11.04 (x86_64) was the base operating system with the respective binary and open-source driver updates on top of the Linux 3.1 kernel.

All testing was facilitated using the Phoronix Test Suite. After the OpenGL performance tests were complete, additional tests were done to monitor the GPU core temperature, CPU utilization, and system power consumption. The Phoronix Test Suite monitors the GPU temperature for Radeon hardware via the OverDrive extension when using the proprietary Catalyst driver while with the open-source Radeon driver it taps the exposed hwmon kernel driver for reading the core temperature. The system power consumption is monitored using a Watts Up USB power meter connected to the power supply and automatically polled by the Phoronix Test Suite. When monitoring these sensors, their values are logged every three seconds and in these graphs the averages are displayed. (If you have any problems viewing these graphs, it's due to the new OpenBenchmarking.org embedded graphs, so please report any issues.)