15-Way GPU Comparison With Mesa 10.3 + Linux 3.17

For those that have been mailing in requests for benchmarks of Mesa 10.3 with Linux 3.16~3.17 given that's what most Q4'2014 Linux distributions are setting to ship, here's a 15-way graphics processor comparison on this stack.

Using the Mesa 10.3 packages that recently landed in Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn are some fresh benchmarks of the latest Ubuntu 14.10 state but with switching to the mainline Linux 3.17 kernel. All tests were done from the Intel Core i7 4770K system with Gigabyte Z97-HD3 motherboard, 8GB of RAM, and 140GB Western Digital WD1500HLHX HDD. Ubuntu 14.10 was in its updated state as of a few days ago with Unity 7.3.1, X.Org Server 1.16.0, xf86-video-ati 7.4.0, xf86-video-intel 2.99.914, and xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.11. Mesa 10.3.0 was present while as said we upgraded to the Linux 3.17 Git kernel as Ubuntu 14.10 by default is shipping with Linux 3.16; there's a few DRM driver improvements in 3.17 worth testing.

The graphics processors tested included:

1: AMD Radeon HD 4850
2: AMD Radeon HD 4870
3: AMD Radeon HD 5770
4: AMD Radeon HD 6450
5: AMD Radeon HD 6570
6: AMD Radeon HD 6870
7: AMD Radeon HD 6950
8: AMD Radeon HD 7850
9: AMD Radeon HD 7950
10: AMD Radeon R7 260X
11: AMD Radeon R9 270X
12: Intel HD Graphics 4600
13: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680
14: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770
15: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti

The graphics processors tested mostly came to being a somewhat random assortment of relatively recent graphics cards that were at my disposal during the time of the testing. The NVIDIA graphics cards testing was intentionally limited due to the poor state of Nouveau re-clocking. Additionally, a few bugs were encountered with some other NVIDIA GPUs attempted with this software stack:

All benchmarks were facilitated using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software.