Phoronix Lauds AMD's Open Source Radeon Driver Progress For 2014

Phoronix has taken an in-depth look at progress on AMD's open source Radeon driver, and declares 2014 to have been a good year. There are several pages with detailed benchmarks, but the upshot is overwhelmingly positive: Across the board there's huge performance improvements to find out of the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver when comparing the state at the end of 2013 to the current code at the end of this year. The performance improvements and new features presented (among them are OpenMAX / AMD video encode, UVD for older AMD GPUs, various new OpenGL extensions, continued work on OpenCL, power management improvements, and the start of open-source HSA) has been nothing short of incredible. Most of the new work benefits the Radeon HD 7000 series and newer (GCN) GPUs the most but these tests showed the Radeon HD 6000 series still improving too. ... Coming up before the end of the year will be a fresh comparison of these open-source Radeon driver results compared to the newest proprietary AMD Catalyst Linux graphics driver.

Comments

New drivers much better

[future assassin]

I run an A10-5800 and an A-10 7700K and the newest drivers since about 3 months ago give me way better performance now. I normally play Xonotic and with the new drivers with my 5800/DDR3 1833 I can max out the effects settings and still get 60-90 FPS on properly designated maps. If I lower the settings to Normal I get anywhere from 90-140 FPS. Before that I was having issues with Ultra settings and lots of weird movement lag.

Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe if the open source drivers get good enough they can port this stuff to Windows and replace AMD's mess there as well.

Re:the obligatory....

[Zontar The Mindless]

No, 2015 caps the Decade of the Linux Desktop.

It's finally getting ot the point where I literally can't help people with their Windows machines, because I'm forgetting how Windows does things. At long last, thank $$__DEITY__.