AMD Radeon R9 290 On Ubuntu 14.10: RadeonSI Gallium3D vs. Catalyst

Moving onto synthetic tests, the latest open-source AMD Radeon Linux code has Plot3D running at 67% the speed of the closed-source Catalyst driver.

With the very basic Triangle test inside GpuTest, the Linux 3.18 + Mesa 10.4-devel performance was less than half the speed of the closed-source Catalyst driver.

Linux 3.17 makes a big difference for the AMD Hawaii open-source support with re-clocking now working right. However, with Linux 3.18 there doesn't appear that there's any more gains to be found. RadeonSI Gallium3D for the Radeon R9 290 series is becoming more competitive to Catalyst but there's still a ways to go, especially when considering that the open-source driver code only supports OpenGL 3.3 versus OpenGL 4.4 with Catalyst, the open-source OpenCL support still has a ways to go, etc. Regardless, the open-source AMD Linux support is constantly improving and still much better off than the open-source NVIDIA/Nouveau driver state.