Radeon Open-Source Performance Over Three Years, Compared To Legacy Catalyst

First up for testing was the (now defunct) Nexuiz game. The performance has more than doubled for the Radeon HD 4870 between Ubuntu 11.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 (most of the improvement was made in going from 12.10 to 13.04) but there wasn't any further change going from Ubuntu 13.10 to Ubuntu 14.04. The newer GCN-era GPUs are what really benefit from the Ubuntu 14.04 upgrade over Ubuntu 13.10. At the end of the day, while the performance has evolved a lot in the past few years for the Radeon HD 4870, the Ubuntu 11.10 installation with Catalyst ended up being the fastest while also rendering correctly.

With the very basic OpenArena game, there's a 15% improvement in the frame-rate found for the RV770 GPU with Ubuntu 14.04 over Ubuntu 13.10. This basic early GL2 era game frequently saw performance improvements out of new Linux kernel and Mesa releases, but in 2014 it's still not enough to outperform a three-year-old Catalyst driver.

The newer OpenArena 0.8.8 release that makes use of GLSL and other functionality didn't see any improvement with Ubuntu 14.04 and making matters worse is it's still a long shot from hitting Catalyst for this Radeon HD 4000 series graphics card.