AMD Radeon R9 290 On Linux

All of the AMD graphics cards were tested with the Catalyst 13.11 Beta 6 release, which was (and still is right now) the latest version at the time of testing. With this latest AMD Catalyst Linux driver, overclocking wasn't supported for the R9 290 and the GPU frequency information wasn't even fully displayed under Linux. On the NVIDIA side was the 331.20 Linux graphics driver. All testing happened from an Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" system with Ubuntu 13.10 x86_64 with Xfce desktop and running the mainline Linux 3.12 kernel.

With not having any overclocking support from the Catalyst Linux driver for the R9 290, all ten graphics cards were tested at their default frequencies. Up first are the Linux OpenGL benchmarks followed by a look at the power consumption and thermal performance. All benchmarking was handled via the Phoronix Test Suite.

If you appreciate all of this Linux benchmarking being done, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium to support this timely testing and in helping out since having to buy the Radeon R9 290 graphics card due to AMD's recent lack of support.