Latest Radeon Graphics Results On Ubuntu 14.10 Are A Bit Concerning

Earlier this week I posted some Ubuntu 12.04 LTS vs. 14.04 LTS vs. 14.10 benchmarks that focused on the overall system performance aside from the graphics. In this article are the OpenGL results for the three releases of Ubuntu Linux for the Radeon (R600g) Gallium3D driver.

From the same system with dual AMD Opteron 2384 processors, 8GB of Registered DDR2 memory, 64GB OCZ Agility EX SSD, and Radeon HD 5830 graphics, the tests of Ubuntu Linux were carried out. The tested scenarios included:

- Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS with Linux 3.13, Mesa 10.1.3, and xf86-video-ati 7.3.0.

- Due to the nature of the Ubuntu LTS point releases, Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS too ended up with Linux 3.13, Mesa 10.1.3, and xf86-video-ati 7.3.0 but it was able to expose OpenGL 3.3 rather than OpenGL 3.0 for the Radeon HD 5830 graphics card.

- Ubuntu 14.10 with the Linux 3.16 kernel, xf86-video-ati 7.4.0, and Mesa 10.3.

- Ubuntu 14.10 + Git with the Linux 3.18 kernel, xf86-video-ati 7.5.99, and Mesa 10.5-devel.

All of the Radeon HD 5830 open-source graphics driver benchmarks in this article were carried out via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.

The other Ubuntu OS default packages and settings were used throughout testing. If these results are of interest to enough people, I'll carry out further testing (and trying to go back to earlier LTS point releases) on a wider selection of graphics cards.