Ubuntu 14.10 Offers AMD Radeon Driver Performance Improvements

With the OpenArena game there wasn't much change in performance for the R600g-based hardware: HD 4870, HD 5770, and HD 6870. With the newer RadeonSI Gallium3D driver on the HD 7850, HD 7950, and R9 270X, there were frame-rate improvements to note in Ubuntu 14.10 over Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. With both the old and new driver, there's further performance improvements to find out of using the Oibaf PPA and Linux 3.17 on Ubuntu 14.10, which will ultimately be incorporated -- plus more optimizations -- into Ubuntu 15.04 next spring.

The HD 4870 and HD 5770 saw no improvements between 14.04 and 14.10 for World of Padman, but the HD 6870 did see a nice frame-rate improvement. Like with OpenArena, Padman improved for all three GPUs using the RadeonSI driver -- besides the newer kernel and Mesa, Ubuntu 14.10 also packages a newer version of LLVM as used by RadeonSI with the AMD GPU back-end. The Oibaf PPA and Linux 3.17 bring more performance improvements than what's found out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 14.10... Too bad Ubuntu Linux isn't a rolling release distribution.