A Quick Test Of The TF2 Update When Using The AMD Proprietary Driver

Yesterday Valve released a big update to Team Fortress 2 that brought renderer improvements for OS X and Linux gamers. However, how does it affect the performance of this popular free-to-play game?

Earlier in the day I happened to run some 1080p and 4K benchmarks of Team Fortress 2 on a Radeon R9 285 graphics card using the AMD Catalyst 15.9 Linux graphics driver. So following the Team Fortress 2 update last night, I decided to see how the performance impacted that game's performance. However, as Steam doesn't have the options for allowing one to lock to a specified revision of a game or the ability to roll-back to a specific revision/update, this standalone R9 285 test is all I have to share today, since Steam had auto-updated. Likewise, as I hadn't enabled the PTS memory monitor module prior to the original testing, I don't have any system memory measurements and can't obtain that data now due to Steam (this update reportedly lowers the memory use by around 500MB).
Anyhow, from this quick and basic testing, here are the results from last night's TF2 update on Ubuntu Linux:
In both cases of the R9 285 on the AMD proprietary driver, the performance of the new update was lowered. Granted, the release notes for yesterday's update outlined memory improvements, faster map loading, texture streaming, and other changes without any mention of direct frame-rate improvements.