Preview: Radeon Gallium3D Performance For CS:GO On Linux

Last week's closed-source Catalyst numbers against today's Ubuntu 14.10 open-source RadeonSI configuration. Again, in the next few days (or even later today / tomorrow) will hopefully be the start of some upgraded Mesa/DRM numbers. The Oibaf PPA unfortunately didn't work out with Steam in the system's current configuration as Steam was running into some OpenGL issues.

The Radeon HD 7850 did remarkably well against Catalyst: 63 vs. 74 FPS. However, with the other hardware the problems were more apparent. As a possible reason for the HD 7850 open-source performance doing so well is that the closed-source driver's performance was less than stellar: the HD 7950 was nearly twice as fast as the HD 7850 with Catalyst.

While the HD 7850 with RadeonSI Gallium3D ran 85% the speed of Catalyst, for the HD 7950 it amounted to just 47%. The Radeon R7 260X graphics card meanwhile was performing very dismal with an average frame-rate of just 10 FPS compared to 136 FPS with Catalyst.

Long story short, the driver configuration shipped right now for Ubuntu 14.10 (or older; with less than Mesa 10.3) isn't in prime shape for running Valve's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive game on Linux. You'll certainly want to be manually upgrading your open-source graphics drivers to get the best CS:GO experience, unless of course you're already using the latest due to a rolling release distribution. Stay tuned for more tests shortly.