CS:GO & TF2 Extensively Tested On The Newest Open-Source Radeon Linux Driver
First up was running Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with the default time demo and settings employed by the Phoronix Test Suite csgo test profile. At 2560 x 1600 on the very latest open-source Radeon graphics code, the only GPUs able to deliver above a 60 FPS average were the Radeon HD 6950 and Radeon R9 290. Some thoughts on these results:
- It's great to see the Radeon R9 290 actually being the fastest GPU testing, as it should be... It took about one year for the AMD Hawaii open-source driver support to get all squared away and now it finally is in reasonable shape with the Linux 3.17 kernel and newer. The Radeon R9 285 couldn't be tested for this article since that support is being brought up on the new and unreleased AMDGPU Linux driver.
- The Radeon HD 6950 is running faster than the Radeon HD 6870, which is different compared to our results from just a few months ago. The AMD HD 6900 series Cayman support was neglected and generally with our OpenGL tests the HD 6870 has been the fastest GPU supported by the R600 Gallium3D driver, but with this very newest code, the HD 6950 is stepping up and delivering.
- The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for supporting the GCN / HD 7000 series GPUs and newer has been improving a lot this year. Though in looking at these results between the HD 7950 / R9 270X and the HD 6870, it looks like there's still more optimizations needed within RadeonSI Gallium3D and the AMD LLVM GPU back-end.
The most power hungry GPU tested was the Radeon R9 290, which doesn't come as much of a surprise. The R9 290 was followed by the Radeon HD 6950, HD 6870, and then the HD 4870.
The graphics cards delivering the best performance-per-Watt on the very latest open-source Linux graphics driver code for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was the Radeon R7 260X and followed right behind was the Radeon R9 290. The R9 290 delivers three times the power efficiency as the Radeon HD 4870. The low-end Radeon HD 5450 and HD 6450 were by far delivering the lowest efficiency for gaming.