AMD Radeon R9 290: Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10 - Don't Expect Much Better Performance

Written by Michael Larabel in Ubuntu on 19 October 2015 at 09:27 PM EDT. 2 Comments
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While thwarted by some open-source Radeon DRM issues, here are some Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" graphics card benchmarks between Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10 for those curious.

In still working through a larger comparison and also now running into the lack of working AMD Catalyst support on Ubuntu 15.10, tonight to share are just some Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" GPU numbers under Ubuntu 15.04 and Ubuntu 15.10 out-of-the-box.
Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10 Radeon R9 290 Linux AMD GPU

This comes down to an AMD R9 290 comparison with Linux 3.19 and Mesa 10.5.9 on Ubuntu 15.04 versus Linux 4.2 and Mesa 11.0 on Ubuntu 15.10. However, as noted already, Ubuntu 15.10's Mesa stack isn't built against a new version of Mesa thus lacks OpenGL 4.0/4.1 support by default. Given that this article is just a quick, one-page article, in a follow-up post I'll include some results when using the Mesa Git results built against LLVM 3.8 SVN. This article is just intended for showing the default performance of Ubuntu 15.04 vs. Ubuntu 15.10.
Ubuntu 15.04 vs. 15.10 Radeon R9 290 Linux AMD GPU
For tonight's limited comparison, you can see these OpenGL R9 290 - Ubuntu 15.04 vs. Ubuntu 15.10 benchmark results via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. As far as the out-of-the-box performance is concerned, Ubuntu 15.10 is actually slower in some cases than Ubuntu 15.04. Again, many more tests comings in the hours/days ahead -- as quick as I can accomplish all of this work single-handedly. If you wish to support this testing, please consider a tip or Phoronix Premium.
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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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