AMD Radeon R9 290 Linux Update With Source Engine On Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

While Counter-Strike: Source became CPU limited with the higher-end graphics cards on this Intel Haswell system running Ubuntu Linux at 1920 x 1080 and 2560 x 1600, there is something interesting... While the Radeon R9 290 is very fast and goes head-to-head with many of the higher-end NVIDIA GPUs tested, the Radeon graphics cards were topping out at a noticeably lower frame-rate than the NVIDIA Linux driver. At 1920 x 1080 the R9 290 was averaging 212 FPS (along with graphics cards going back to the HD 6870) while the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 and above were at 230~252 FPS.

With Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, the Radeon R9 290 was able to push ahead and the game was less CPU bottlenecked compared to Counter-Strike: Source, but still a breeze for the AMD Hawaii GPU with an average frame-rate of 288 FPS. The R9 290 performance was ahead of the GTX 760 but slightly behind the GeForce GTX 680.