RadeonSI Gallium3D vs. Catalyst At 4K UHD On Linux

Last week I published some open-source performance numbers for running the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver at 4K UHD. Today is a performance comparison of the open and closed-source AMD Linux drivers using the latest code atop Ubuntu while running at 3840 x 2160.

The open-source driver stack tested was with the Linux 3.17 Git kernel while using the Oibaf PPA to upgrade to Mesa 10.4-devel for the latest RadeonSI and LLVM AMD GPU code. The closed-source driver was the fglrx 14.20.7 / OpenGL 4.4.12968 Catalyst release. When running the Catalyst binary blob we had to downgrade from Linux 3.17 to Linux 3.16 for kernel compatibility. All tests were done from the Intel Core i7 5960X system running Ubuntu 14.10.

This testing is straightforward and like our other AMD Catalyst vs. Gallium3D driver comparisons but for this article specifically focusing on 4K UHD testing at 3840 x 2160 The graphics cards tested in this article included the Radeon R7 260X, Radeon R9 270X, and Radeon R9 290 as the available Rx 200 series graphics cards within my possession for testing.

Let's see how the open and closed-source drivers compare at 4K on the pages ahead. Benchmarks were done via the Phoronix Test Suite software. Unfortunately there can't be an open vs. closed NVIDIA driver comparison at the 4K resolution for now since none of the NVIDIA hardware is mode-setting right for 4K UHD when using the current Nouveau driver.