AMD Radeon R9 285 Tonga Performance On Linux

Overall the AMD Radeon R9 285 was a decent performer on Ubuntu when using the supported Catalyst Linux driver. The results were mixed but the R9 285 Tonga GPU generally held its ground and didn't deliver any abnormal Catalyst Linux problems.

Under Windows the Radeon R9 285 is generally faster than the GeForce GTX 760, but under Linux with the proprietary drivers, this wasn't always the case. The Radeon R9 285 had some wins with Xonotic and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive while in other OpenGL workloads like Unigine and Tesseract the R9 285 -- and the other AMD GPUs -- were losing our by measurable margins to the NVIDIA GPUs with their proprietary driver. It will be interesting to see though if any of these existing Catalyst Linux driver bottlenecks are overcome when migrating to the forthcoming unified driver stack with AMDGPU kernel driver -- of course, at Phoronix we'll have many benchmarks along the way.

The Radeon R9 285 -- and more broadly the AMD GCN GPUs on Linux -- with Catalyst can be praised for their OpenCL compute performance. The Radeon R9 285 on Catalyst did very well against the NVIDIA GPUs with their binary blob.

The operating temperature of the XFX Radeon R9 285 seemed very reasonable and when it came to the power consumption the results also stood well against the competing GeForce GTX 760.

When it comes to the open-source Radeon R9 285 driver support, well, there isn't anything public right now. The R9 285 is to be powered by the new unified AMDGPU Linux driver but that code isn't yet out so there isn't much more to say right now besides that as soon as the AMDGPU code starts dropping we'll be sure to test it. AMD has no plans to support Tonga by the current Radeon DRM driver stack. It will also be interesting to see how well the new Catalyst driver works out once these changes have been made and if AMD finally delivers Mantle support to Linux.

If you are okay with using the current Catalyst Linux driver and looking to spend around $250 USD on a new GPU, the Radeon R9 285 Tonga is a reasonable graphics card for Linux users and gamers. Unless you're frequently engaging in workloads where the Catalyst Linux driver broadly does worse than the NVIDIA Linux driver, the R9 285 generally competes with or exceeds the GeForce GTX 760.

The Radeon R9 285 is selling for $250+ at the former price point of the GTX 760, since the Tonga debut the NVIDIA competition has lowered in price to around ~$200+ so it does offer better value. However, if going for the mid-range NVIDIA GPUs, you'll basically be bound to using the proprietary NVIDIA driver for the foreseeable future with NVIDIA's open-source strategy being a much darker story than AMD's Linux work that generally is becoming quite suitable for end-users but it can still be bumpy at times.

Stay tuned for Linux benchmarks on Phoronix of the new AMDGPU driver stack as soon as the code premieres.