After last week delivering a Linux hardware review of the AMD
Radeon R9 270X graphics card with the binary Catalyst driver on Ubuntu, and
then yesterday looking at the
Radeon Gallium3D driver posing a threat to Catalyst when using the mature
"R600g" driver on HD 5000/600 series hardware, up today are new open
vs. closed-source benchmarks. In this article we're looking at the performance
of the Radeon R9 270X GPU when using the Ubuntu 13.10 open-source graphics stack,
then when upgrading to Mesa 10.0 with Linux 3.12 DPM, and then comparing those
numbers to the proprietary Catalyst Linux graphics driver.
As shown in previous Phoronix articles, the RadeonSI
Gallium3D driver that provides the open-source OpenGL driver for AMD Radeon
HD 7000/8000 and Rx 200 series graphics cards is not nearly as mature as the R600
Gallium3D driver that supports from the HD 2000 series through HD 6000 series
graphics processors. My tests from September showed RadeonSI
still being troublesome with the
performance having a long way to go and the OpenGL functionality being still
behind R600g, which is still behind the hardware's potential and what's supported
by the Catalyst driver. Features like GPGPU/OpenCL compute support are also still
being worked on, etc.
With the Radeon R9 270X "Curacao XT" being a modified "Pitcairn"
graphics core from the Radeon HD 7000 series, the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver already
supports this graphics processor that launched earlier this month. The configurations
that the Radeon R9 270X was tested under Linux today include:
Ubuntu 13.10 Stock - The standard "out of the box"
configuration of the AMD graphics driver in Ubuntu 13.10 x86_64. The key components
here are the Linux 3.11 kernel and Mesa 9.2.1.
Ubuntu 13.10 + Mesa 10 - The Ubuntu 13.10 installation when
upgraded to the Mesa 10.0 Git state via the Oibaf
PPA for easy reproducibility.
Ubuntu 13.10 + Mesa 10 + Linux 3.12 DPM - The Ubuntu 13.10
installation with Mesa 10.0 Git (like the last configuration) but then also upgrading
to the latest daily package for the Linux 3.12 Git kernel and also enabling Radeon
DPM for dynamic
power management.
Ubuntu 13.10 + Catalyst 13.11 b6 - Installing the Catalyst
13.11 Beta 6 driver on Ubuntu 13.10. This was the latest AMD Catalyst binary driver
for Linux as of test time.
All benchmarking was handled via the Phoronix
Test Suite. Additional RadeonSI benchmarks from other available Radeon HD
7000 series graphics cards will come in November.
