11-Way AMD Radeon GPU Comparison On Linux 3.12, Mesa 9.3

While the open-source Linux graphics drivers have advanced quite a lot in the past year, there's still a long road ahead in competing with the proprietary drivers. The OpenGL support is still likely at least a year behind until there's full OpenGL 4.x support, the performance on older GPUs is likely "good enough" to most users but not yet at parity with Catalyst, the RadeonSI HD 7000 series support is still lacking and a long shot from Catalyst, and there's numerous other bugs and missing features to be addressed. Regardless, the results today are quite commendable with the Linux 3.12 kernel (DPM enabled) and Mesa 9.3-devel and the open-source developers working on the Linux driver code certainly deserve applause.

Again, a comparison against the AMD Catalyst driver for maximum performance will come later on Phoronix, but you can see our HD 6000 comparison and HD 5000 Gallium3D vs. Catalyst comparisons from August. Coming up later this week will also be a Nouveau comparison of NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards from Linux 3.12 and Mesa 9.3.