Radeon Graphics Yield Mixed Results With Linux 3.17 Kernel

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 23 August 2014 at 09:30 AM EDT. Page 1 of 5. 13 Comments.

Earlier this week I ran the article about open-source Radeon graphics having some improvements with Linux 3.17 but after further testing of a range of AMD GPUs spanning multiple generations, for not all hardware are AMD graphics cards faster with this experimental kernel. In this article are benchmarks of the Linux 3.17 kernel with Mesa 10.3-devel showing the winners and losers from the Radeon HD 5000 series through the latest Radeon Rx 200 series graphics cards.

This article serves as a comparison of the stable Linux 3.16 kernel against the latest Linux 3.17 Git kernel when testing a range of graphics cards from the Radeon HD 5770 through the Radeon R9 270X. The system setup was maintained the same through testing and Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS was used as a host but with upgrading to the Mesa 10.3-devel and xf86-video-ati 7.4.99 Git using the Oibaf PPA. With Linux 3.16.0 and Linux 3.17 Git, the following AMD graphics cards were tested on the Intel Core i7 4790K rig:

- Radeon HD 5770
- Radeon HD 6870
- Radeon HD 6950
- Radeon HD 7850
- Radeon HD 7950
- Radeon R9 270X

Also on Monday will be the long-awaited open-source results for the Radeon R9 290 graphics card, which wasn't included in this comparison since only with the Linux 3.17 kernel is it now playing well.

AMD Radeon Linux 3.17 Benchmarks

All of this benchmarking was done via the Phoronix Test Suite to compare the Radeon DRM driver with these two latest kernel versions.


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