AMD Radeon Graphics Benchmarks On The Linux 3.18 Kernel

If you're curious whether the Linux 3.18 kernel will bring any performance improvements for users of the open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver, here's some benchmarks compared to Linux 3.17.

The Radeon DRM driver with the Linux 3.18 kernel brings re-clocking improvements for select graphics cards, Userptr support, R600 UVD video decoding support, concurrent buffer read support, and other changes.

To see if there's any performance improvements overall, I ran some Linux 3.17 vs. 3.18 Git benchmarks with several different Radeon graphics cards. The tested AMD GPUs included the Radeon HD 5770, HD 6950, HD 7950, R7 260X, R9 270X, and R9 290 graphics cards as a diverse range of GPUs from several generations.

These six AMD Radeon graphics cards were tested on Linux 3.17.0 and Linux 3.18 Git from this weekend while running Ubuntu 14.10 with the Oibaf PPA for having Mesa 10.4-devel and xf86-video-ati 7.5.99.

All of the OpenGL benchmarks in this article for the Radeon 3.18 DRM testing was done with the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.