AMD Catalyst 15.9 Linux Benchmarks

With yesterday's Catalyst 15.9 Linux driver release bringing fixes for a number of Steam Linux games, it's been a busy night benchmarking this latest Catalyst Linux driver release. Here are some initial numbers.

While I didn't have a pre-release of Catalyst 15.9 for Linux to benchmark in advance, since its availability I have been running a ton of different benchmarks with this driver given that at least its public change-log cites a number of fixes to games that are popular right now with Linux gamers. In this article are a portion of these early tests while more Catalyst 15.9 Linux performance figures will be published in the days ahead, including how the performance now compares to the latest open-source driver, competition against NVIDIA, etc.

For this initial Catalyst 15.9 benchmarking roundabout, the performance was compared to Catalyst 15.7 on the same Xubuntu 15.04 system. Due to time pressure and being the first article, tested in this round were the Radeon R9 290 as well as the Radeon R9 Fury. The few other (modern, GCN) AMD cards in my possession will be added for some of the later comparisons.

Using a variety of OpenBenchmarking.org test profiles that are automated, run well, and still working with Steam, I ran this dual graphics card comparison of Catalyst 15.7 and 15.9 with the results being available on the pages ahead. All of the other system hardware and software details were, of course, maintained during this testing with the benchmarking being facilitated by the Phoronix Test Suite.