AMD Radeon R9 270X On Linux

After the Radeon Rx 200 "Volcanic Islands" graphics cards launched, I really had no idea what to expect on Linux. AMD decided not to communicate any information with me -- or provide any review sample(s) -- and as a result there's been no real information on the Linux support for the latest GPUs. Fortunately, I decided to purchase the Gigabyte Radeon R9 270X graphics card for just over $200 USD and it ended up being a very good purchase.

While the AMD and NVIDIA graphics card comparison was limited to the cards in my possession and unfortunately no Radeon HD 7870, the performance was very compelling against the Radeon HD 7850 and Radeon HD 6870/6950 graphics cards. In some of the workloads the Radeon R9 270X even beat out the Radeon HD 7950 and in other cases was just competitive. On the NVIDIA side, it obviously outperformed the GeForce GTX 460 and GTX 550 Ti while the performance obviously came up short of the GeForce GTX 680 as expected.

When using the Catalyst 13.11 Beta driver on Linux, the support for this graphics card and features were first-rate. I haven't encountered any new issues with the R9 270X graphics card on Linux compared to other existing general Catalyst Linux driver problems.

If open-source support is important for you, there will be proper Radeon Rx 200 series support in due time for the new GPUs. However, right now it isn't there and it will take some months until the "RadeonSI" support for the Radeon HD 7000/8000 and Rx 200 series graphics cards is comparable to the more mature R600 Gallium3D driver. If you're buying a GPU now and want to use the open-source driver over Catalyst, you are best off buying a Radeon HD 5000/6000 series graphics card for best performance and feature support on the open-source AMD Radeon Linux driver. But if the binary Catalyst Linux driver is fine by you, the Radeon R9 270X is a darn nice graphics card for the $200 segment.

If the performance results and information in this Radeon R9 270X review was helpful to you and your buying decisions, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium or making a PayPal tip, due to having had to buy this graphics card over AMD's apparent lack of interest in having Linux coverage of their latest hardware.