Open-Source Radeon Performance Boosted By Linux 3.16

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 23 June 2014 at 03:27 AM EDT. Page 3 of 3. 77 Comments.

With Unigine Tropics, the GCN graphics cards using RadeonSI Gallium3D are finally becoming competitive with the Radeon HD 6870 that's back on the more mature R600 stack. The Radeon HD 7850 for this test was up by 21%, the HD 7950 up by 27%, and the R9 270X up by 34%.

Unvanquished was a rare OpenGL test case that saw no performance improvements out of the updated Direct Rendering Manager code.

Warsow also saw no changes in performance.

When running Xonotic, the HD 7850 was faster by 5%, the HD 7950 was faster by 7%, and the R9 270X was speedier by 5%.

If you're using a Radeon HD 7000 series graphics card or newer, the Linux 3.16 kernel should certainly be worth the upgrade once the code has been stabilized. The performance improvements were very apparent for numerous Linux games and besides the enhanced performance is also HDMI deep color support, HDMI audio clean-ups, and much more.

Now that Nouveau and Radeon for Linux 3.16 have been tested, up next are the Intel Linux graphics tests.

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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.