Proprietary vs. Linux Git, Mesa 11.2-devel, DRI3 For R600g/RadeonSI

BioShock Infinite at 4K show that the open-source driver remains significantly behind the closed-source driver.

The DiRT Showdown results were fairly promising for the open-soure driver stack with Mesa 11.2-devel + Linux 4.4 + DRI3.

Like at 1080p, the Metro results on the open-source driver stack were significantly behind the proprietary driver results.

The tests didn't end up coming out as envisioned due to re-clocking issues with the R9 285 / R9 Fury on the kernel tested. However, I'll be trying to get a working configuration for some follow-up tests or will revert back to my older 4.3 kernel build with the original PowerPlay patches. Also lessening the data to explore was the Radeon HD 7950 running into problems for many of these OpenGL tests, which may be due to a regression in the kernel branch used for testing or in Linux 4.4 upstream as generally that older GCN card has worked quite reliably on the open-source driver code.

Of the data that was there, hopefully you found it interesting as it showed some areas where the different graphics cards on the latest open-source driver code can perform quite well compared to Catalyst / Radeon Software. However, it also showed some workloads where the performance was still significantly behind the proprietary driver.

Stay tuned for more follow-up tests along with other year-end Linux graphics benchmarks on Phoronix.