AMD Radeon R9 290 OpenGL On Ubuntu 15.04: Catalyst vs. RadeonSI Gallium3D

While I've posted some new AMD OpenGL benchmarks on Ubuntu 15.04 since last week's release of the Vivid Vervet, the Radeon R9 290 wasn't tested since at that time this Hawaii graphics card was busy on other Phoronix test systems. However, due to the interest level in seeing some fresh Ubuntu 15.04 numbers for the Radeon R9 290 series, here's some numbers.

This test is comparing the out-of-the-box performance of the Radeon R9 290 on Ubuntu 15.04 when using the default open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D stack (Linux 3.19 + Mesa 10.5.2) to the Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver found in the Ubuntu Vivid archive (fglrx 15.20.2 / OpenGL 4.4.13374). The focus is just on the out-of-the-box Ubuntu 15.04 experience for R9 290 owners that may consider upgrading to this new Ubuntu Linux release and that most Ubuntu users tend to stick to their Ubuntu-supplied kernel and SRUs.

Mesa on Ubuntu 15.04 (and in Git) is still limited to providing OpenGL 3.3 support while the Catalyst driver supports up through OpenGL 4.4. Additionally, Ubuntu doesn't yet ship any OpenCL or HSA driver packages by default on Ubuntu 15.04 for the open-source drivers.

For additional perspective, alongside the Radeon R9 290 in both configurations I re-tested the Radeon R9 270X to add a pre-Hawaii GCN GPU. All of the benchmarks in this article were powered by the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.