With having done clean installs of Debian 8.4 and Debian testing (Stretch) the past few days on the same box, here are some fresh comparison numbers for your viewing pleasure.

From my Xeon E5-2687W v3 (Haswell) system with FirePro V7900 (Cayman) graphics, I compared the out-of-the-box performance of Debian 8.4 to what's currently offered by Debian Testing.

Debian 8.4 has Linux 3.16, Mesa 10.3.2, and GCC 4.8.4 while Debian Testing has Linux 4.5, Mesa 11.1.3, and GCC 5.3.1, among other updated packages.

All of these results for this individual system can be found via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.

The newer Mesa does help open-source Radeon performance a bit for some games, even with this Cayman GPU using the older R600g driver. The newer kernel also helps with AMD's open-source driver stack constantly evolving.

You can build a kernel slightly faster with Debian Testing...


Some other benchmarks are slightly faster with Debian Testing.

Find out more via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.