AMD Catalyst 14.12 Omega Driver Brings Mixed Results For Linux Users

The Furmark performance for the Radeon R9 290 was faster by 14%.

The GpuTest Triangle benchmark was much faster with the Radeon R9 290.

The performance of the Catalyst 14.12 driver was certainly interesting for the AMD Radeon R9 290 graphics card with its performance seeing several significant improvements in the various OpenGL workloads encountered. However, for the older AMD graphics cards the changes in this Linux OpenGL testing tended to be minimal and in some cases the performance had even regressed with this Omega driver. At least aside from the R9 290 series performance improvements, there's several new features to Catalyst 14.12.

Feedback from the community about this new AMD Linux driver release can be found via this lengthy forum thread.

While the R9 290 performance improvements are great, in earlier Linux GPU tests is where we've found the Hawaii performance to come up short compared to NVIDIA's competition and the numbers we've seen under Windows. Coming up shortly will be a fresh NVIDIA vs. AMD Linux graphics card comparison.