AMD Kaveri: Open-Source Radeon Gallium3D vs. Catalyst 14.12 Omega Driver

Last week when running Linux benchmarks of the AMD Catalyst 14.12 Omega driver that is much improved over older versions of Catalyst on both Windows and Linux, plus running a fresh 12-way AMD vs. NVIDIA Linux GPU comparison with the newest drivers, there were many Phoronix reader requests for some new AMD APU Linux numbers from this Omega driver. In this article are the Omega benchmark results for an AMD A10-7850K APU when testing both the open and closed-source drivers.

With an AMD A10-7850K Kaveri APU with Radeon R7 Graphics running on Ubuntu 14.10, the following Radeon Linux driver configurations were tested:

- Ubuntu 14.10 following a clean install with the Linux 3.16 kernel, xf86-video-ati 7.4.0, and Mesa 10.3.0.

- Ubuntu 14.10 with the Oibaf PPA enabled plus using the Linux 3.18 stable kernel from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA. The updated user-space components via the Oibaf PPA were xf86-video-ati 7.5.99 and Mesa 10.5-devel Git. This is basically a look at the latest open-source AMD Radeon graphics code for the Kaveri APU.

- Switching Ubuntu 14.10 back to the Linux 3.16 kernel and then enabling the fglrx-updates driver in the Ubuntu Utopic archive that provides fglrx 14.20.7 / OpenGL 4.4.12968.

- Upgrading the Ubuntu 14.10 system to using the new Catalyst 14.12 Omega driver -- fglrx 14.50.2 / OpenGL 4.4.13283

A range of OpenGL benchmarks were run across the four Radeon driver configurations. The OpenGL tests were executed in an automated and fully repeatable manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software and the selected test profiles were ones known to be in good shape on both the open and closed-source AMD Linux drivers.

With all of that said, let's get to these fresh AMD Kaveri APU Linux numbers.