Radeon Graphics Yield Mixed Results With Linux 3.17 Kernel

With Unigine Heaven the HD 6870 performance again recessed with the Linux 3.17 development kernel while the newer GCN hardware was commonly a bit faster.

It's a bit sad to see the Radeon HD 6870 slowing down with Linux 3.17 since that graphics card tended to do the best on the Radeon side for delivering the best open-source performance in using the mature R600g driver. The Radeon HD 6950 performance continues to be slower than the HD 6870 when using the open-source AMD Linux driver.

For Xonotic with high quality settings, the HD 7850 was about 16% faster with Linux 3.17 over Linux 3.16. The HD 7950 was about 8% faster with the newer kernel while the HD 6870 performance remained slower.