AMD Radeon R9 285 Tonga Performance On Linux
Without any open-source driver support for the Radeon R9 285 until the AMDGPU stack makes its debut this fall, users are limited to using the proprietary Catalyst driver. When using the fglrx 14.30 stack that was the special driver update for the Radeon R9 285, everything worked just fine. However, when using the fglrx 14.40 (OpenGL 2.0) Linux Catalyst driver, it doesn't appear that this release branch received the Tonga enablement.
With the newer 14.40 series Linux driver code there was a hang of the Radeon R9 285 when booting the system. But when fortunately moving back to the 14.30 driver, everything worked fine. Hopefully with the upcoming fglrx 14.50 Linux update the Tonga support will be sorted out for the mainline driver.
Over the past week of testing the Radeon R9 285 on Ubuntu Linux with the 14.30 series driver everything has been working out fine: no hardware hangs, rendering issues, etc, just the usual Catalyst Linux experience. The experience was pretty much spot on with other recent Radeon GCN Linux GPU launches being supported by the Catalyst driver.
The graphics cards tested against the Radeon R9 285 included:
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980
- AMD Radeon HD 7850
- AMD Radeon R7 260X
- AMD Radeon R9 270X
- AMD Radeon R9 285
- AMD Radeon R9 290
The GPUs for this comparison were obviously limited to those within my possession which sadly on the AMD side have been more limited in recent years -- thus no R9 280/280X comparison point or many other GCN GPUs due to a lack of review samples from AMD in recent periods. Fortunately there's many NVIDIA data points thanks to their cooperation. The Radeon R9 285 is aimed to compete with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 and under Windows at least usually beats it out. For my Radeon HD 7950 I usually benchmark in these articles, with the fglrx 14.30.4 driver it failed to mode-set properly on this driver release when using the 4K UHD display (no other GPUs encountered this issue but fortunately the regression is fixed with the 14.40 series driver).