How Ubuntu 16.04 Is Performing With AMDGPU/Radeon Graphics Compared To Ubuntu 14.04 With FGLRX

Now onto the very basic and old OpenArena game just for getting a look at the driver performance -- and with this being an OpenGL 2 test, it ran fine on the open-source AMD driver stack of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

With the OpenArena test, unfortunately, the proprietary fglrx driver on Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS was still noticeably faster than the open-source driver. Of course, the frame-rates were all extremely high so the game is playable on nearly any modern GPU on any driver, but it shows that there still is some great efficiency to be had from the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

With the more modern Tesseract open-source game, the performance between the open-source Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS (Mesa 11.0 + Linux 4.2) and Ubuntu 16.04 (Linux 4.4~4.5 + Mesa 11.2) was roughly the same, except for the AMDGPU hardware like the R9 Fury where there is working open-source acceleration and most recently the re-clocking/PowerPlay support. While the open-source driver is able to handle this game, it's another test where the fglrx driver was faster with the exception being the R9 Fury graphics card that was fastest on the new open-source driver code.

The Team Fortress 2 results show the newer open-source AMD Linux graphics driver code on Ubuntu 16.04 doing better than on Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS. Unfortunately, the proprietary fglrx driver is still noticeably faster than these open-source results.