Phoronix had a very pleasant surprise over the weekend which was apparently also a complete surprise to the AMD Linux driver team; vastly improved GPU performance on the 3.12 kernel. In tests on a dozen cards ranging from the elderly HD3850 to the HD6950 all cards showed at least some improvements and in some cases increases of 50%. Keep your eyes tuned for updates as they work with AMD's Linux team to see where these performance increases originated from and to give Phoronix time to get their hands on new hardware for more testing. Check out the complete review here.
"Over the weekend I released benchmarks showing the Linux 3.12 kernel bringing big AMD Radeon performance improvements. Those benchmarks of a Radeon HD 4000 series GPU showed the Linux 3.12 kernel bringing major performance improvements over Linux 3.11 and prior. Some games improved with just low double-digit gains while other Linux games were nearly 90% faster! Interestingly, the AMD Radeon Linux developers were even surprised by these findings. After carrying out additional tests throughout the weekend, I can confirm these truly incredible performance improvements on other hardware. In this article are results from ten different AMD Radeon graphics cards."
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running kernel 3.12 rc5 on
running kernel 3.12 rc5 on ubuntu 13.10 and it is running great on my netbook!
Looking at the benchmarks,
Looking at the benchmarks, I’m not really impressed. Yes, moving from 120fps to 180fps is a big theoretical difference, but nothing in practice. If these drivers could be shown to have a real effect at low fps, where the change is needed, that would have been something worthwhile.
what the heck are you talking
what the heck are you talking about? low fps is low because of other bottlenecks, not [only] the gpu. – AMDbumlover
Very impressive, it’s about
Very impressive, it’s about time Linux gaming has been taken seriously, no doubt due to the recent announcement of steamOS.
Valve are to thank for this. 50-90% is ground breaking, and this is only the start. 2014 is going to be huge.