20-Way Intel/AMD/NVIDIA GPU Comparison With Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

These results hardly come as a surprise to us given that the Nouveau DRM driver doesn't yet have user-ready re-clocking support so the NVIDIA GeForce GPUs can actually operate at their rated speeds... Thus all the NVIDIA GPUs on the open-source driver are severely handicapped for the time being. Aside from that, the other results are mostly in order sans the Radeon R7 260X open-source issues.

The Intel Haswell HD Graphics 4600 on the Core i7 4770K were running at about twice the speed of the Radeon HD 6450 GPU when using the open-source drivers.

Overall the AMD Radeon graphics cards on the open-source drivers were doing great. During the past six months, the RadeonSI open-source driver for supporting the Radeon HD 7000 series and newer GCN GPUs has matured a heck of a lot. The RadeonSI open-source support is nearly as in good standing as the mature R600g driver for Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series graphics processor support.

If you want better open-source graphics performance you can always try upgrading the kernel and Mesa compared to the stable versions shipped in the upcoming Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release. Have other open-source Linux GPU driver questions? Let us know in the forums.