AMD Radeon R9 270X On Linux

With this being the first AMD Radeon Rx 200 series graphics card at Phoronix built atop the latest GCN architecture, I was curious to see how it'd work under Linux. When hooking up the Radeon R9 270X and booting into Ubuntu Linux, the graphics card was working fine with the Catalyst 13.11 Beta.

Using the Catalyst 13.11 Beta, the support was basically right on par with other recent generations of AMD Radeon hardware. There was no notable features lacking or other difficulties for using the new Volcanic Islands graphics card on Linux.

If your plan would be to use the open-source graphics driver, that isn't a real possibility right now for the Radeon R7 or R9 series. The open-source driver isn't ready yet and regardless there's a lot of work to be accomplished. The support will be based off the "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver, which supports from the Radeon HD 7000 series and beyond, but its performance is lacking and it only supports OpenGL ~3.0 functionality while the hardware, of course, can handle OpenGL 4.3/4.4. There are also numerous other missing features to this open-source driver. It would be incredibly foolish to use a $200+ Volcanic Islands GPU on the open-source Linux driver right now when you can get much superior results with the open-source stack if buying a Radeon HD 6000 series GPU or older. I would anticipate another six months until the open-source Volcanic Islands support would be in decent shape for day-to-day production use. Fortunately, while the AMD Catalyst driver tends to be notorious amongst Linux gamers, it's been improving generally a lot in the recent updates and should become more compelling in 2014.