Ubuntu 15.04 Offers Faster OpenGL For AMD Radeon GPUs On Open-Source

Sans the low-end HD 6450/6570 graphics cards, the higher-end AMD GPUs saw significant performance improvements with OpenArena when upgrading from Ubuntu 14.10 to Ubuntu 15.04! Of course, enthusiasts can easily upgrade their kernel, Mesa, and LLVM on Ubuntu 14.10, but many Linux users don't and stick to what's offered by the Ubuntu package repositories. The Radeon R9 270X is 14% faster in just the past six-months on the open-source Radeon Linux driver.

The results for the more demanding Tesseract game were mixed. The older graphics cards still relying on the R600g driver didn't see any measurable performance changes while the newer GCN graphics cards on RadeonSI saw boosted performance with Ubuntu 15.04.

With the demanding Unigine Heaven benchmark, the RadeonSI graphics cards again saw their performance boosted while there wasn't much change for the R600g driver on Ubuntu 15.04.

Unigine Tropics saw greater performance out of the newer graphics cards on the RadeonSI driver while the R600g performance regressed for the three older graphics cards.