Linux 3.5 Can Massively Boost AMD Radeon Graphics Performance

Swap buffers wait was disabled during testing but everything else was the defaults -- in terms of the unfortunate states of 2D color tiling, PCI Express 2.0, and Hyper-Z. Ubuntu 12.04 was tested at its defaults too, meaning the stock Unity desktop environment for all tests. In another article, we will look at the performance of Radeon in an optimized state versus Catalyst, but for now, there is The May 2012 Open-Source Radeon Graphics Showdown.

All benchmarking was facilitated via the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org. Doom 3, Lightsmark, Nexuiz, OpenArena, and Xonotic were the test profiles used in this article.