Will Linux 4.5 Bring Any Performance Boost For Pre-AMDGPU Radeon?

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 24 December 2015 at 04:54 PM EST. Add A Comment
RADEON
While I've been writing a lot the past few days about the AMDGPU kernel driver given it's landing PowerPlay support for Linux 4.5, I took some time today for running some Radeon (non-AMDGPU) DRM tests to see if the performance of this DRM-next code has changed compared to Linux 4.4 near-final.

I just ran some tests on a Radeon R9 290 and R7 370 for now with the Radeon DRM driver from Linux 4.4 Git and then my latest Radeon DRM-Next kernel spin for the code that's going to land during the Linux 4.5 kernel merge window. Mesa 11.2-devel + LLVM 3.8 SVN was maintained during testing as were other system settings.
Radeon Linux 4.4 vs. 4.5 DRM

For the most part, no big performance changes:
Radeon Linux 4.4 vs. 4.5 DRM

But BioShock Infinite and Xonotic looks like they were trying to push harder on the newer kernel graphics driver code:
Radeon Linux 4.4 vs. 4.5 DRM
Radeon Linux 4.4 vs. 4.5 DRM
All of these quick Linux 4.4 vs. 4.5 Radeon DRM reference tests can be found via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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