AMD's Open-Source Radeon Linux Driver: 2014 Was Incredible

OpenArena 0.8.5 is the least demanding OpenGL Linux game we ever test with at Phoronix. While the OpenArena 0.8.5 release is easily playable on basically any GPU and any driver of recent years, it's worthwhile for showing any performance benchmarks when being limited near totally by the CPU. With this 2014 comparison, we see that the HD 6870 performance with Linux 3.18 + Mesa 10.5-devel is up marginally over Ubuntu 13.10. With the newer graphics cards using the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver rather than R600 Gallium3D, the performance improvements this year were huge with the frame-rates of the HD 7850 and R9 270X more than doubling with Ubuntu 14.10 and then pushed even further with the newest Git code.

With the newer OpenArena 0.8.8 release, the performance over the past year of the open-source AMD Linux driver for the HD 7000 series and newer has quadrupled.

The other ioquake3 test used for reference was Urban Terror.

The Urban Terror performance was up greatly for the AMD GCN GPUs but not nearly by the margins witnessed when running OpenArena.