AMD A10-7870K Godavari: RadeonSI Gallium3D vs. Catalyst Linux Drivers

Last week I started posting AMD A10-7870K Linux benchmarks for this "Godavari" APU that's effectively a Kaveri Refresh and slightly faster for its four CPU cores and Radeon R7 Graphics over the former high-end Kaveri, the A10-7850K. In today's articles are some benchmarks of the Radeon R7 Graphics on the A10-7870K when running Ubuntu and testing the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver against Catalyst on Linux.

The same A10-7870K configuration as last week was used with the ASUS A88XM-E motherboard, 2 x 8GB of DDR3-2400MHz memory, and 250GB Samsung 850 SSD. Ubuntu 15.04 x86_64 was running on the system while testing its stock Radeon driver stack (Linux 3.19 + xf86-video-ati 7.5.0 + Mesa 10.5.2), then testing an upgraded stack with the Linux 4.1 kernel and Mesa 10.7-devel via the Oibaf PPA, and then testing the Catalyst Linux driver packaged for Ubuntu Vivid via fglrx-updates (fglrx 15.20.2 / OpenGL 4.4.13374

As a reminder, the A10-7870K Godavari quad-core has a 3.9GHz base frequency with 4.1GHz turbo frequency and boasts Radeon R7 Graphics running at 866MHz while the rest of the features/specifications are identical to the A10-7850K Kaveri. This 95 Watt TDP APU currently retails for $140~150 USD.

A variety of OpenGL Linux workloads that run fine on both driver stacks were tested on the same hardware. All of the benchmarks were conducted via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.