The AMD Radeon Performance Is Incredible On Linux 3.12

Starting with the CPU-limited OpenArena 0.8.5 game, we see the performance rising for most of the tested AMD Radeon graphics cards... The Radeon HD 3850, HD 4670, HD 4730, and HD 6870 graphics cards saw very noticeable increases in performance when simply upgrading from Linux 3.11 to Linux 3.12. However, the HD 4890, HD 5830, HD 6450, HD 6570, HD 6770, and HD 6890 graphics cards saw no real change in performance out of the yet-to-released kernel.

With the newer OpenArena game that is more demanding, the results are similar but a few more GPUs benefited from the Linux 3.12 kernel performance upgrades over Linux 3.11 when run at a resolution of just 1024 x 768. The GPUs not being boosted by this test profile run were the Radeon HD 5830 and HD 6450 and HD 6770. The seven other graphics cards on the R600 driver from the HD 3850 through HD 6950 saw noticeable jumps in the frame-rate. The Radeon HD 6870 graphics card was faster by 52% while the Radeon HD 3850 was up by 47%.