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

Lastly, with all of the synthetic GpuTest cases, the performance was again boosted for the newer graphics cards using the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. In some situations, the older AMD graphics processors on the Radeon R600g driver also improved.

For those with a Radeon HD 7000 series graphics card or newer, the open-source out-of-the-box Radeon performance on Ubuntu 15.04 will almost surely be better than under Ubuntu 14.10. In this time there's been significant improvements to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as well as the AMD GPU back-end within LLVM. X.Org Server 1.17 on Ubuntu 15.04 is also able to offer better/faster 2D performance thanks to the GLAMOR optimizations. If you're stuck with an older graphics card relying on the R600 Gallium3D driver, there weren't as many performance changes to find considering this driver is reaching a relatively mature state and doesn't receive as much attention as the newer RadeonSI driver. However, if you're an open-source Radeon user, it should be the best experience yet when upgrading to Ubuntu 15.04 -- assuming you're not running a custom Mesa + LLVM + Linux upgraded stack on an older Ubuntu installation.

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