AMD Kaveri OpenCL Compared To Radeon & GeForce GPUs On Linux

With Parboil's OpenCL Histo test, the A10-7850K performance was quite poor and running at about the same speed as the Radeon HD 6450. The most shocking result though was the Radeon R9 290 OpenCL result... It was the slowest. As shown in the Linux OpenGL results from earlier articles, the R9 290 graphics hardware has some issues with the Catalyst Linux driver. For at least this test it shows the OpenCL performance is also negatively impacted too. Hopefully AMD will improve their Hawaii GPU Linux support in the near-term. Overall, the NVIDIA graphics cards were leading over AMDD with the GTX 550 Ti and above all out-running all of the tested Radeon graphics processors.

In another Parboil OpenCL test we see the A10-7850K Kaveri OpenCL performance doing much better and coming ahead of the Radeon HD 6870 but behind the Radeon HD 7850. The R9 290 graphics card was also running fast for this OpenCL kernel. In general the NVIDIA hardware was running slightly behind the Radeon HD 7850.

Switching over to the Rodinia scientific program, the OpenCL Heartwall performance for the A10-7850K Kaveri put it still between the HD 6870 and HD 7850. Interestingly the Radeon HD 6870 was computing at about the same speed as the GeForce GT 520 and GTX 650 graphics cards. The fastest graphics card for this workload wasn't the Radeon R9 290 but the GeForce GTX 770.

The AMD Radeon graphics processors with the Catalyst driver do poorly for the OpenCL Leukocyte benchmark in comparison to the NVIDIA graphics cards.