RadeonSI Gallium3D vs. Catalyst At 4K UHD On Linux

Xonotic with ultra image quality settings at 3840 x 2160 was still delivering above 60 frames per second on the open-source driver for the R7 260X and R9 270X. However, with the R9 290 that should have been the fastest, its performance was awful given the current driver shortcomings for Hawaii hardware.

Until further tuning takes place, Xonotic with ultimate image quality settings really isn't an option for the mid-range Rx 200 series hardware at 4K UHD unless using Catalyst.

The mid-range Rx 200 series graphics processors with RadeonSI Gallium3D were running at about 65% the speed of Catalyst on Ubuntu 14.10 Linux.

The AMD Radeon R7 260X and R9 270X were generally running at about 60% or greater the speed of Catalyst at the 4K UHD resolution (3840 x 2160) in the selection of Linux-native OpenGL benchmarks used in this article. The Radeon R9 290 performance on the open-source driver meanwhile continues to suffer greatly until re-clocking is fully working for the Hawaii GPU and/or other optimizations, which won't come now until at least Linux 3.18 but given the drm-next merge window closing soon, probably not until Linux 3.19 or even later.