10-Way AMD GPU Comparison For Team Fortress 2 With RadeonSI Mesa 13.1-dev

In case you didn't hear, last week a nine year old Mesa bug was fixed that ended up causing stability issues for RadeonSI and was one of the reasons Valve's Team Fortress 2 game wasn't running stable on the open-source AMD driver in quite a while. With Mesa Git now running Team Fortress 2 on RadeonSI without any stability problems, here are fresh benchmarks of that game when using Mesa 13.1-dev and Linux 4.9.

As mentioned in a few other articles already, a big year-end RadeonSI OpenGL performance comparison on many different graphics cards will be published in the days ahead. But given Team Fortress 2 back to running nicely on RadeonSI without stability concerns, I decided to run fresh benchmarks on ten different GCN graphics cards to show the performance difference.

All tests were done with the same system, of course. All the TF2 benchmarking was fully-automated via the Phoronix Test Suite.

Tested was a Radeon HD 7750, HD 7950, R7 260X, R9 270X, R9 285, R7 370, RX 460, RX 470, RX 480, and R9 Fury.

Team Fortress 2 was tested at both 1080p and 4K.

At 1920 x 1080, with any of the modern AMD graphics cards, the performance is basically CPU bound and seeing around the same frame-rates across the board... But at least it gets more interesting with 4K.

The RX 460 can almost fluidly handle Team Fortress 2 at 3840 x 2160 while anything better can run TF2 at 4K without having to worry about any stuttering. Mesa 13.1-dev was playing well during testing without anything to worry about. If you want to compare your own system's performance to the results in this article simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1612169-TA-TEAMFORTR57. Stay tuned for a much more exciting (and larger) AMD Radeon Linux OpenGL comparison shortly.