The Most Power Efficient & Best Value Of AMD GPUs For Linux Gamers

Earlier this week I published some performance-per-watt and performance-per-dollar NVIDIA Linux benchmarks while in this article today are similar tests done on the AMD Radeon front with the Catalyst proprietary driver on Ubuntu Linux.

The tests today are to serve as some reference figures when looking at the performance-per-Watt and performance-per-dollar OpenGL performance to complement the raw performance figures on Linux. Like the NVIDIA tests, all of the testing and calculations were done automatically with the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software, with performance-per-dollar calculations being the latest feature addition in the code on GitHub.

The prices used were the currently available prices for each of the tested graphics cards listed on Amazon.com in USD. The overall AC system power consumption was measured using the USB-based WattsUp power meter.

In the article earlier this week the entire NVIDIA Maxwell GPU line-up was tested, a portion of the cards we routinely test with when it comes to NVIDIA Linux benchmarks. Unfortunately, our AMD test line-up is not nearly as well covered. The cards tested today for this article were the AMD Radeon R9 285, Radeon R9 290, Radeon R7 370, and Radeon R9 Fury.

Aside from the R7 260X and HD 7850 occupied in two of the LinuxBenchmarking.com rigs, the HD 7950, and the R9 270X that doesn't seem to mode-set properly with the latest Catalyst Linux drivers, those are the only GCN cards I have available for testing. Nearly every AMD card tested in the past few years on Phoronix has been purchased retail by myself since AMD hasn't been submitting review samples for Linux testing in a couple of years; compared to NVIDIA sending every model at launch. Thus if you want to see more AMD Linux graphics card tests on Phoronix, subscribe to Phoronix Premium or make a PayPal tip while firing off an email or Tweet to me expressing your support and what sort of AMD Linux tests you wish to see going forward. Thanks for your support and understanding with this limited AMD comparison.

With that said, on the following pages are these reference performance-per-Watt/USD benchmarks under Ubuntu 15.04 for these four modern AMD graphics cards. All tests were done at 1080p and 4K and the same tests were run as with the large NVIDIA comparison. The same system hardware and Ubuntu 15.04 installation was used, so if you wish to compare the meta performance-per-Watt/dollar benchmarks at the end of this article to the previous results, you are able to do so.