The OpenGL Speed & Perf-Per-Watt From The Radeon HD 2000/3000 Series Through The R9 Fury

Well, there you have it if you've been curious how the OpenGL performance and power efficiency has evolved going back from the RV600 days with the Radeon HD 3650 and HD 3850 all the way up through the latest GCN GPUs with the likes of Hawaii, Tonga, and Fiji. It's a pity though that for this testing the Radeon R9 Fury was still running into some performance faults on this latest Linux graphics driver code so we aren't yet able to see the true potential of this Fiji GPU with High Bandwidth Memory when using the non-proprietary driver.

As a reminder, the driver configuration atop Ubuntu 15.10 for this article was using the DRM-Next code to be included in Linux 4.5, Mesa 11.2-devel Git master with the LLVM 3.8 SVN back-end, AMDGPU PowerPlay support enabled for Tonga and Fiji, and enabling DRI3 rendering.

Most interesting from these results was seeing how the performance evolved from the HD 3850, which was high-end going back a number of years, to now how it runs against the Tonga (R9 285) and Hawaii (R9 290) graphics cards. Besides the OpenGL frame-rates being many times better, the performance-per-Watt is a great deal better.

Hopefully you found these results insightful. If you wish to see how your own Linux system's graphics performance compares to all of the results in this article, it's very easy to do so using our fully-automated Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. With the Phoronix Test Suite installed, simply run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1601146-PTS-RADEON2031 for an automated, side-by-side performance comparison against all of the benchmark results shown in this article. It's that easy!

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