AMD Linux Graphics: The Latest Open-Source RadeonSI Driver Moves On To Smacking Catalyst

The synthetic OpenGL tests in GpuTest also offer much hope for the direction of the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver.

These RadeonSI Gallium3D vs. Catalyst Linux results today are easily the most competitive we've seen the open-source driver ever, this is with the DRM-Next code for Linux 4.3 plus the Mesa 11.1-devel Git and LLVM 3.8 SVN back-end. The only card really not performant was the Radeon R9 285, but that's due to the AMDGPU kernel driver not having power management / re-clocking support. The AMDGPU power management support will hopefully come for Linux 4.4, which will be great news for the R9 285 and R9 Fury. The Radeon HD 7950 and R7 370 cards performed particularly well today relative to the Catalyst driver on Ubuntu 15.04. The Radeon R9 290 certainly delivered the best open-source driver performance for this high-end Hawaii graphics card, but it had the largest difference in performance between the open-source driver and Catalyst.

These results also largely jive with what's been independently reported recently by Phoronix readers about RadeonSI doing much better these days with the latest Git code.

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