AMD Radeon R9 290 OpenGL On Ubuntu 15.04: Catalyst vs. RadeonSI Gallium3D

With the ever-basic OpenArena first person shooter, the Radeon R9 290 ran faster than the Radeon R9 270X, but the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver on R9 270X ran closer to the Catalyst performance levels... Catalyst was 1.28x faster than RadeonSI Gallium3D on the R9 270X but for the R9 290 it was 1.64x.

With the new SuperTuxKart 0.9 open-source racing game, the graphics processors on the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver were running much better than with Catalyst while still rendering the game correctly.

With the Tesseract game the Catalyst driver was 26% faster with the R9 290 or 20% with the R9 270X.

The Catalyst driver packaged in the Ubuntu Vivid archive had stability issues when running Unigine Heaven.

While running the less demanding Unigine Tropics benchmark, Catalyst on the R9 290 was 50% faster than RadeonSI Gallium3D out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 15.04. The R9 270X with Catalyst was meanwhile 37% faster than the open-source driver.