AMD Tonga & Fiji Open-Source Performance Boosted By PowerPlay Patches

First up is the demanding Metro Last Light game on Steam for Linux.

Yep, with PowerPlay support, the performance is multiple times faster thanks to these Tonga and Fiji graphics cards being able to run at their rated frequencies. It's too bad that it took months for AMD to get this PowerPlay support out there and that it will still be months before seeing it in a released Linux kernel version and to be found out-of-the-box in Linux distributions. These results do show that the Radeon R9 Fury performance on the open-source driver is still problematic with this high-end AMD graphics card losing out significantly to the Radeon R9 285.

While some question at times why I still run OpenArena frequently in graphics tests... Even though this is an old OpenGL 2 game, it managed to uncover an open issue with the Radeon R9 Fury not being able to run this game without crashing.

With Tesseract, the Radeon R9 285 Tonga is now running about five times faster! However, it still shows that the Radeon R9 Fury on the open-source driver is still hitting some issue as while its performance is much faster with PowerPlay, it's still multiple times slower compared to where this $500+ graphics card should be performing.