25-Way Open-Source Linux Graphics Card Comparison

The first test ran was of Doom 3, which is the well known id Tech 4 game but still presses the open-source drivers well and is able to render properly across the Intel i965, R600g, RadeonSI, and Nouveau Mesa/Gallium3D drivers. The Intel "Haswell" HD Graphics 4600 performance was in line with the Radeon HD 4670 on the open-source graphics driver. For all of the NVIDIA graphics cards their performance is crippled due to the lack of Nouveau power management / re-clocking, but their results are still shown since many people are still using NVIDIA hardware with Nouveau; it's the out-of-the-box Linux experience.

When it came to the Radeon hardware being tested, for the most part it was performing very great. The only performance item to point out is that the Radeon HD 6900 series "Cayman" support isn't as well optimized still as the earlier Northern Islands GPUs and with the newer GPUs (Radeon HD 7850, HD 7950, and R9 270X) the newer RadeonSI Gallium3D driver is still maturing. This week though with the latest Gallium3D and LLVM code they did achieve OpenGL 3.3 compliance on RadeonSI.

The story is basically the same with OpenArena... However, the Radeon HD 6950 performance seemed abnormally low in this test, compared to the R600g-based HD 6870 and RadeonSI-based Radeon HD 7850.

In terms of the OpenGL game/benchmark selection used, be sure to first read about Running Benchmarks On Other New Linux Games.