Radeon Linux 4.6 + Mesa 11.3 vs. NVIDIA Linux Performance & Perf-Per-Watt

Xonotic at 4K also put the AMD Radeon results in a better light compared to NVIDIA's GeForce Linux performance with their proprietary drivers.

It will be fun to see how Polaris and Pascal compare to all of this OpenGL Linux test data, stay tuned in the weeks ahead.

The R9 Fury performance is still coming up short at 4K for the Tesseract open-source game.

For the 4K testing, here's a look at the GPU core temperature and system power consumption over the course of all our 3840 x 2160 Linux gaming benchmarks:

Well, that's the latest big batch of Linux hardware performance data I have to share today. These Linux 4.6 + Mesa 11.3-dev results on AMD Radeon cards compared to NVIDIA GeForce GPUs with their proprietary driver show that there still is much more room for improvement still within the AMDGPU/Radeon DRM kernel drivers and RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. However, in a select number of the tests -- and especially at 4K -- the results were starting to be more competitive with NVIDIA than we have seen from past open vs. closed graphics driver comparisons.

Hopefully you found these numbers interesting whether you were curious about how the AMD Radeon performance-per-Watt has evolved over time, just wanted to see how the red and green teams are competing on Linux, etc. Stay tuned for Polaris and Pascal tests on Phoronix in the weeks ahead. To help support our testing and allow us to invest in more hardware in cases where not being seeded with review samples, please consider joining Phoronix Premium while you get the added benefit of ad-free viewing and seeing multi-page articles on a single page.

If you want to see how your own Linux system(s) compare performance-wise to the results in this article, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and run MONITOR=gpu.temp phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1605187-HA-RED1080PL93 for the 1080p OpenGL comparison or MONITOR=gpu.temp phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1605182-HA-RED4KLINU62 for the 4K comparison.