Radeon DRM Linux 4.4 + Mesa 11.1 + DRI3 vs. AMD's Proprietary Driver

With Xonotic the Catalyst driver maintained a greater lead over the newest open-source code, more so than what was seen with OpenArena or Tesseract.

The R7 370 on Catalyst was acting up over here as well.

For the synthetic OpenGL tests, the demanding Furmark benchmark saw similar performance of the R9 290 between the open and closed driver while the HD 6870 was still measurably faster with Catalyst. Under the Triangle test largely limited by video memory bandwidth, Catalyst was multiple times faster.

Well, overall, these results show quite positive results for the open-source driver code as found in Linux 4.4 and Mesa 11.1 and LLVM 3.8, plus manually setting up the Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 support. However, in some tests there still clearly is more optimization work that's needed for the open-source AMD Linux driver to be competitive with Catalyst, or now called the Radeon Software driver package.

If you missed the earlier results, see my AMDGPU comparison and Nouveau vs. NVIDIA numbers from the Linux 4.4 kernel. If you enjoy all of the Linux hardware tests that happen daily on Phoronix, consider taking advantage of our 2015 holiday offer that allow for more tests like this to happen.