AMD Kaveri: Open-Source Radeon Gallium3D vs. Catalyst 14.12 Omega Driver

While the open-source AMD Radeon performance improved when switching to Linux 3.18 and Mesa 10.5-devel, the Catalyst driver remains faster. However, the Catalyst 14.12 driver didn't provide any performance improvement over the months old Catalyst release shipped for Ubuntu 14.10.

The peak frame times were higher with the latest Catalyst Linux release than its predecessor, but not as bad as the latest open-source driver code.

The Tesseract game ran slightly slower with the newer Catalyst driver, but it was still faster than the latest open-source Radeon driver code.

With Unigine Sanctuary, Catalyst 14.12 didn't provide any performance benefits like it did with select discrete GPUs. Catalyst was 38% faster for this demanding OpenGL test case than the newest open-source driver code.