The Most Comprehensive AMD Radeon Linux Graphics Comparison

When the system was idling, the GPU temperature was higher and the system was burning through more power with each of the graphics cards. However, with the load provided by Warsow on each of the GPUs, there was not much of a power consumption difference since each of the GPUs are running at their maximum power states (the Radeon always does by default, where as the Catalyst driver clocks down on newer hardware and has its other power management features when not experiencing complicated loads). In fact, the power consumption with the open-source stack tended to be slightly less for some of the tested graphics cards with Warsow 0.61, but this is the game where barely any of the Radeon graphics cards can run at a playable frame-rate with Gallium3D.

Hopefully you enjoyed this very extensive look at the ATI/AMD Radeon Linux drivers across a large selection of hardware with valuable information on each of the pages. Each driver has its own distinct advantages and disadvantages depending upon your hardware/software configuration, intended workload, and what features are most important to your needs. Neither driver, however, is perfect. The open-source Radeon Linux driver is also arguably the best open-source Linux driver for discrete graphics cards and at least it has the backing of AMD -- unlike NVIDIA that provides no open-source support, but the community relies upon reverse-engineering to produce a driver with mixed-results. If the open-source driver works on your system and meets all of your needs, great, but otherwise there is the Catalyst Linux driver.

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