AMD Radeon RX 480 On Linux

Next up is a look at the power efficiency of this AMD Polaris high-end graphics card. Here's a look at some OpenCL and OpenGL results when the Phoronix Test Suite was automatically measuring the performance-per-Watt during the testing process on a per-test basis to accurately calculate the power efficiency of each tested graphics card.

With SHOC, the Radeon RX 480 performance-per-Watt was just ahead of the R9 Fury, which compared to NVIDIA was past the GTX 980 (Ti) but well behind the new Pascal-based GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 graphics cards. The performance-per-Watt improvement for the RX 480 over the R9 290 in this test was 36% more efficient.

With Metro Last Light Redux where the game tends to not perform as well with the AMD Linux driver compared to NVIDIA, the RX 480 performance-per-Watt was tied with the Radeon R9 Fury, which was between the GTX 960 and GTX 970.

The performance-per-Watt in the Unigine Heaven test -- where the AMD Linux performance is competitive in raw speed -- put the Polaris graphics card in line with the Radeon R9 Fury, which came up well behind the GTX 1070/1080 Pascal graphics cards but still ahead of the GeForce GTX 980 Maxwell series.