AMD Radeon R9 290 On Linux

There's something clearly wrong with the AMD Radeon R9 290 on Linux. Windows reviews have the R9 290 running at speeds that can be compared to the GeForce GTX TITAN or GTX 780, but under Linux the GTX 680 can beat the R9 290 in numerous OpenGL benchmarks. At first I thought the disappointing performance might have been due to incorrect clocking of the R9 290 by the Catalyst 13.11 Beta 6 driver (the latest available) used during benchmarking if it isn't changing power states aggressively enough or it's not moving to its highest power state. The Catalyst Linux driver might require further tuning for Hawaii GPUs, but we'll see in forthcoming Linux driver updates ahead. The reason I mention this comes down to overclocking not yet being supported by the AMD Catalyst Linux driver for the R9 290 and the driver not displaying the clock frequencies for the graphics card so it's hard to tell what the biggest issue is with the R9 290 on Linux. It might also be the OpenGL driver for the Hawaii GPUs is just in a poor state since most of the focus is on Direct3D games on Windows.

While the poor Linux performance might be clocking related, it could also be clocking down when at absurdly high temperatures. After seeing the GPU thermal results, it is scorching hot! During testing this retail XFX graphics card was running around 90 Celsius according to the Catalyst driver. At these temperatures, power management might be kicking in and sending the clock frequencies lower. The R9 290 was running much hotter than previous generation GPUs on the same system and consuming a great deal of power.

Regardless of being a buggy Catalyst Linux driver right now or the R9 290 hardware having thermal issues, the Linux performance was disappointing. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 was routinely running comparable to -- or faster -- than this $400 Hawaii graphics card. Under Windows the results of the R9 290 were competitive with the higher-end GeForce 700 series hardware, but under Linux it was being beat out at times by a GTX 680. The Radeon R9 290 wasn't also too much faster than a Radeon HD 7950 on Linux.

While I was looking forward to running the Radeon R9 290 on Linux after spending over $400 on the graphics card, in the end it's disappointing: it's super hot, consumes a lot of energy, and the OpenGL performance is disappointing from the latest Catalyst Linux driver. Stay tuned to Phoronix to see if the Radeon R9 290 is improved by forthcoming Catalyst Linux driver updates. I'm hopeful the performance will become at least a bit better when the driver support is properly tuned.

If you were looking towards the Hawaii GPUs for open-source support, check back on Phoronix in a few months to see how the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has matured. Right now the R9 290 series open-source support is only hitting the latest development code and isn't shipped by any Linux distributions and the acceleration support is even disabled by default.

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