Mesa Git Yields Performance Improvements For Newer AMD GPUs

First up was running Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on the open-source AMD drivers. With the Radeon HD 6870 there was a measurable performance improvement with Mesa Git while the Radeon HD 6570 performance was unchanged, the Radeon HD 7850 performance regressed, and the Radeon R9 270X performance shot through and was running much better than on Mesa 10.3.0.

The OpenArena game indicated improvements for the Radeon HD 6870 and Radeon HD 7950 while the R9 270X performance was shockingly faster with Mesa Git. However, with other Mesa 10.3 era tests of the Radeon R9 270X on other systems, I don't recall such low performance figures for this graphics card. It's possible that for whatever reason with Mesa 10.3 paired with the R9 270X there was bad interaction with the system hardware or 3.18 kernel -- the most likely scenario would seem like there was some re-clocking issue happening.