AMD Radeon R9 290: Gallium3D vs. Catalyst Drivers

The Radeon R9 290 series was announced at the end of September of last year and now nearly one year later we're finally having the Hawaii open-source Linux driver support get into shape. From these test results, for the first few tests where re-clocking was working, the R9 290 could run at 60~70% the speed of Catalyst when using the fully open-source driver. However, with the more demanding tests where things broke, the performance of the XFX Radeon R9 290 4GB graphics card dropped to about 20% the speed of Catalyst. Hopefully in the weeks ahead the open-source AMD team will be able to work out the remaining Hawaii issues and in the longer-term in the months ahead we'll start to see OpenGL 4.x compliance along with end-user-ready OpenCL support.

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