AMD Catalyst 14.12 Omega Driver Brings Mixed Results For Linux Users

First up was the most basic OpenGL (2.1) benchmark still in use... OpenArena. With OpenArena the results were flat except for the Radeon R9 290 that was much faster. The Radeon R9 290 was faster by 27% for this basic benchmark. Seeing the strong gain out of the Radeon R9 290 on Linux is important as in our cross-vendor benchmarking articles, the R9 290 series has generally come up short of NVIDIA's competition.

With the modern Tesseract open-source game, the performance regressed with Catalyst 14.12 for the HD 6870, HD 7850, and R9 270X... The performance clearly dropped but at least with the R9 290 the performance was faster by 9%.

With Unigine Valley the Radeon HD 7850 was faster by almost 30% while the R9 290 was 10% faster and the other GPUs when unchanged.

When switching over to the Qfusion-powered Warsow game, the pre-Hawaii graphics cards saw little movement while the R9 290 performance increased by 23% over the older Catalyst Linux release.