AMD A10-7800 Kaveri: Radeon Gallium3D Improves, But Still Tough Catalyst Fight

It's been a while since last running any open-source vs. closed-source Linux graphics driver benchmarks with AMD Kaveri APUs, but with being busy adding some Kaveri systems to the new Linux test farm, I ran some fresh Linux GPU driver tests on an AMD A10-7800 system. Here's results on Ubuntu 14.10 -- plus with Linux 3.18 and Mesa 10.5-devel -- while compared to the latest Catalyst binary blob.

The AMD A10-7800 Kaveri APU with Radeon R7 Graphics was paired with an MSI A78M-E35 motherboard, 4GB of RAM, and 500GB Western Digital HDD. The Xfce flavor of Ubuntu 14.10 was used for all of the testing. The test configurations in this Sunday article included:

- Ubuntu 14.10 out-of-the-box with the Linux 3.16 kernel, xf86-video-ati 7.4.0, and Mesa 10.3.0.

- Ubuntu 14.10 when upgraded to the Linux 3.18 Git kernel as of this weekend and then using from the Oibaf PPA was xf86-video-ati 7.5.99 and Mesa 10.5.0-devel.

- Lastly was using the fglrx-updates package provided by the Ubuntu Utopic archive for having the Catalyst Linux driver in action on this X.Org Server 1.16 using distribution. The current binary driver version is fglrx 14.20.7 / OpenGL 4.4.12968. There hasn't been an AMD Catalyst Linux update now in over two months, but at least a big new Linux driver is expected this coming week.

All of the AMD Kaveri Linux graphics tests in this article were facilitated using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.