Linux Mint 13 Through Linux Mint 17 Benchmarks
While the disk / file-system performance is a bit off for this system on Linux Mint 17, when it comes to the Radeon HD 4870 with the open-source R600 Gallium3D driver and Radeon DRM kernel driver the performance has evolved nicely over the years.
Linux Mint 17 hits a high point for the open-source Radeon performance overall (and Nouveau/Intel too, given all the upstream improvements) though for the Radeon HD 4870 the performance isn't vastly different for OpenGL workloads compared to last year's Linux Mint 16 release.