NVIDIA Is Still Killing AMD Over Linux OpenGL Performance

FurMark was the Radeon R9 290's one and only win in this round of Ubuntu Linux benchmarking.

There's clearly some odd AMD Catalyst Linux performance issues at hand that have unfortunately continued into 2014 -- months after I first was finding the Radeon R9 290 on Linux to be in poor shape against the NVIDIA competition with their well-maintained Linux binary driver. Hopefully though with a greater number of games coming to Linux, the continued pressure from Valve and others, and interest from AMD in winning deals for Radeon-based Steam Machines, that we'll see a much better Catalyst Linux graphics driver in the months ahead.

Coming out soon will be new open-source vs. closed-source Radeon graphics driver tests to see how the open-source Gallium3D driver is performing; as a preview, this weekend I did share Kaveri Gallium3D vs. Catalyst numbers and also tests showing the Linux 3.13 kernel is important for RadeonSI users.