AMD Radeon: Windows 8.1 Catalyst vs. Linux Gallium3D vs. Linux Catalyst

The tests run in this article are mostly the same as with this week's Intel Windows vs. Linux comparison. With the pre-GCN graphics cards, the Radeon HD 5830 and HD 6870, the Linux performance with the Catalyst driver came up measurably short of Windows 8.1 with the same Catalyst 14.3 Beta release. However, what's exciting about these older GPU results is that the Nexuiz performance is close to being matched to Catalyst when using this driver configuration (Linux 3.13 + Mesa 10.1) as found in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. When testing the Radeon R9 270X, its performance under Linux with Catalyst had surpassed the Windows 8.1 installation on the same system. While the Linux Catalyst driver was faster than Windows for this new graphics card, when using the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver its performance was much slower.

When running OpenArena 0.8.8, all three graphics cards performed about the same under Windows and Ubuntu when using the Catalyst 14.3 Beta driver. When using the open-source drivers shipped by Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, there was a measurable performance hit, particularly for the R9 270X that uses the "RadeonSI" driver while the older two cards use the "R600" Gallium3D driver.