AMD Radeon R9 290 On Ubuntu 14.10: RadeonSI Gallium3D vs. Catalyst

For the OpenArena game, the frame-rate more than doubled when going from Linux 3.16 to Linux 3.17 -- with the very latest code (Linux 3.18 + Mesa 10.4-dev), the R9 290 is performing at 77% the speed of Catalyst on Linux for the R9 290.

For those running Unigine Heaven, the performance did improve as well with Linux 3.17, but the results only show as being faster than Catalyst due to RadeonSI Gallium3D not yet having tessellation support.

Linux 3.18-rc1 wasn't any faster than Linux 3.17 for the AMD Hawaii tests thus far, but Linux 3.17 is a big win over Linux 3.16 -- sadly, Ubuntu users will need to wait until Ubuntu 15.04 until Linux 3.17+ is officially supported. Unigine Sanctuary was running about 65% the speed of Catalyst.