New AMD GPU Performance To Be Boosted By Linux 4.5; How It Compares To The Binary Blob

First up for Metro 2033 Redux at 1080p, using the to-be-found-in-4.5 AMDGPU driver code with PowerPlay enabled, the performance indeed improved by a lot. With re-clocking working, the open-source driver performance when also paired with the latest user-space code was still running at half the speed or less as the proprietary driver. Beyond that, the R9 285 was outperforming the R9 Fury on the open-source driver code... In past tests, this was the same way, but was told that in Mesa Git were more fixes for Fiji/Fury. However, these results with the latest Mesa Git as of this week seem to indicate there are other problems still outstanding.

The Radeon R9 285 has been in the market for over one year and is now starting to become more competitive on the open-source driver, but Tonga owners are still much better off with Catalyst for the time being. With the R9 Fury being a $550+ graphics card, it'd really be a waste to use it full-time on the open-source driver for now.

With the open-source OpenArena game, the R9 285 on open-source was at almost 80% the speed of the proprietary driver. However, the R9 Fury was at just 16%. There's still clearly some R9 Fury open-source issue still outstanding.