Testing 60+ Intel/AMD/NVIDIA GPUs On Linux With Open-Source Drivers

The first test up for this 50-way graphics card comparison on the open-source Linux graphics drivers was OpenArena 0.8.8...

While it's a lot of data to look at, the results shouldn't be too surprising for frequent Phoronix readers... Some notes for those that aren't daily Phoronix readers:

- All of the tested NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards are understandably quite slow when compared to the AMD Radeon graphics cards due to the Nouveau driver's lack of re-clocking. When using the proprietary NVIDIA driver, it's a very different story as the benchmarks in another article in the next few days will show. We await the day Nouveau re-clocking is magically all sorted out as it's the biggest bottleneck right now for this open-source, community-based driver.

- The Radeon HD 6950 Cayman graphics card remains much slower than the Radeon HD 6870 graphics card. The HD 6900 series isn't as well optimized under the open-source driver as are the other Northern Islands hardware. In nearly all OpenGL tests, the Radeon HD 6870 will be measurably faster than the Radeon HD 6950.

- The Radeon R7 260X is slow due to re-clocking issues until loading the very latest firmware/microcode.

- The Radeon HD 6000 series overall is in great shape as the latest generation based upon the R600 Gallium3D driver. The newer GCN hardware uses the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and it's getting into good shape that's on-par with the last of the R600g cards, but you also need to be using the very latest LLVM compiler infrastructure for the updated AMD GPU LLVM back-end.

A box chart with OpenArena's frame latency times for those interested.