12-Way AMD Catalyst 14.12 vs. NVIDIA 346 Series Linux GPU Comparison

The Radeon R9 290 with its performance having been improved significantly by the Catalyst 14.12 driver is performing between the GeForce GTX 680 and GTX 780 Ti levels. The Radeon R9 285, which is retailing for close to $250 USD, was running slower for OpenArena than the GeForce GTX 760 that can be found for around $200.

The peak frame times and averages with OpenArena were also higher using the Radeon GPUs on Catalyst 14.12 than the GeForce GPUs on NVIDIA 346.22.

With the Tesseract open-source OpenGL game, the NVIDIA Linux driver dominated over the tested AMD hardware on Catalyst 14.12. The Radeon R9 290 was running slower than the GeForce GTX 760.. Based on these results it seems Catalyst 14.12 on Linux overall has a broad problem with powering Tesseract compared to NVIDIA's OpenGL handling.