18-Way GPU Linux Benchmarks, Including The Radeon RX 460 & RX 470 On Open-Source

Yesterday I published early open-source benchmarks of the Radeon RX 470 while today is a full 18-way graphics card comparison including the newly-launched Radeon RX 460 and Radeon RX 470 graphics cards alongside the RX 480 Polaris graphics card. All of the AMD graphics cards tested for this article were running the very latest open-source driver stack on the Linux 4.8 kernel and Mesa 12.1-dev Git.

Compared to yesterday's results, there are now the initial RX 460 Linux data with that graphics card having arrived yesterday. For the RX 460 Linux testing I bought the PowerColor RED DRAGON Radeon RX 460 2GB for $109 USD. The RX 470 testing is from the factory-overclocked SAPPHIRE NITRO+ Radeon RX 470. There are also several other GPUs now tested for this comparison to complement the various GPUs stressed in yesterday's article.

The NVIDIA graphics cards tested included the GeForce GTX 950, GTX 960, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, and GTX 1080. The NVIDIA graphics cards were using the NVIDIA 367.35 proprietary driver.

The AMD graphics cards tested were the Radeon HD 7950, R7 260X, R9 270X, R9 285, R9 290, R7 370, R9 Fury, RX 460, RX 470 NITRO+, and RX 480. All of the AMD graphics cards were tested with the Linux 4.8-rc1 kernel and Mesa 12.1-dev Git code from the Padoka PPA.

All the tests happened from the same Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5 Skylake system with MSI C236A Workstation motherboard, 16GB of RAM, Samsung SSD 950 PRO NVMe SSD 256GB, and running Ubuntu 16.10 x86_64. All of the benchmarks in this article were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite GPL benchmarking software.

Test results still being gathered are also of the AMD graphics cards using the latest AMDGPU-PRO driver, to allow for competitive Vulkan and OpenCL benchmarking as well as seeing how the AMDGPU-PRO OpenGL results are comparing to the open-source code. Expect those results and other Radeon RX 460/470 benchmarks to appear on Phoronix in the days ahead. If you appreciate all of the Linux hardware testing done at Phoronix, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium to make more of these tests possible.