Linux 3.12 Brings Big AMD Radeon Improvements

With the CPU-limited OpenArena game, the frame-rate for the Radeon HD 4870 graphics card on pre-3.12 kernels for this ioquake3 game was about 190~200 FPS from the Linux 3.7 to 3.11 kernels. When moving to the Linux 3.12 Git kernel, the frame-rate jumped to 362 FPS! Upgrading the kernel led to an 87% jump in performance for the RV770 GPU.

With the OpenArena 0.8.8 release that makes use of GLSL and is slightly more demanding on the graphics processor, the performance improvement out of Linux 3.12 ended up being a still exciting 15% improvement for the high-end Radeon HD 4000 series graphics card.