AMD Radeon R9 290 Linux Update With Source Engine On Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

With the 15-way Radeon/GeForce Source Engine comparison on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS that was done earlier in the week there were some Phoronix readers disappointed that there weren't any Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" graphics card results. Well, those results are now available today with benchmarks from Counter-Strike: Source, Team Fortress 2, Portal, and Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, for those Steam on Linux gamers curious about its performance.

The Radeon R9 290 is the highest-end AMD graphics card in my possession due to AMD's lack of cooperation in recent times for generally sending out Linux hardware review samples. The Radeon R9 290 I had bought shortly after its debut last year and its Linux performance has been disappointing. The R9 290 wasn't tested earlier in the week since that graphics card was busy in another system at the time and already with the other mid to high-end GPUs they were starting to hit a CPU bottleneck with Valve's Source Engine games. However, for those curious about the Radeon R9 290 performance with the latest Catalyst Linux Beta, those benchmarks are available in this article.

The R9 290 graphics were using the same configuration on the Core i7 4770K as the graphics tests earlier in the week... Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with the Linux 3.13 kernel was used while the Catalyst 14.3 Beta (fglrx 13.35.5 / OpenGL 4.3.12798) was used. The other tested AMD hardware included the Radeon HD 6870, Radeon HD 7850, Radeon R7 260X, and Radeon R9 270X. The NVIDIA GeForce GPUs included the GT 240, GTX 460, GTX 550 Ti, GT 610, GTX 650, GTX 680, GTX 750, GTX 750 Ti, GTX 760, GTX 770, and GTX 780 Ti.

All of this Linux OpenGL benchmarking was handled in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software.