The Graphics Cards On Open-Source Linux Drivers With The Best Value + Power Efficiency

When running Unigine Valley at 1080p, the graphics cards close to running at 60 FPS were the HD 7950 and R7 370 while only the R9 290 came out well above that. While the GTX 650 was fully re-clocked with Nouveau, its performance was very slow and then the other partially re-clocked Kepler GPUs on Linux 4.3 were only running about half the speed of the Radeon competition.

While more expensive than the R7 370, the R9 290 delivered better value for this comparison.

The Radeon R9 290 consumed noticeably more power than the other tested graphics cards....

But in the grand scheme of things, with the great performance out of the Hawaii GPU, the R9 290 performance-per-Watt was right in line with the other GCN GPUs. The Radeon R7 370 led by a small margin. On a power efficiency basis, the NVIDIA GPUs on Nouveau were doing well since they were clocked so low, but we won't see the full story until Nouveau has full Kepler re-clocking at some unknown point in the future.