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Recently I've considered purchasing an AMD GPU for testing purposes and because of the recent benchmarking article I finally decided to abuse my wallet and get myself one. So, here it is along with some of my first impressions!

Update: After messing with the AMD Catalyst Installer I managed to get FGLRX 15.20.1046 (15.7) up and running. This had slight performance increases in places, for example Metro Redux and Unigine Valley. However, a lot of the time the impact was either very minimal or non-existent. The updated driver thus only affected the Valley benchmark in this article and that graph has been changed and corrections added accordingly.

You all are probably aware of the message that gets spread around about AMD GPUs on Linux. They are slow and the proprietary driver is unreliable but supposedly they have well-maintained and quite competent open source drivers. I've never actually used AMD GPUs and the only ATI I had was when I was like 7 years old and I wasn't using Linux at the time so naturally I was at the very least curious to see what the reality was like.

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I picked the Asus Strix R7 370 4G Gaming mainly because of its price and secondly because it's part of the new 300 series GPUs which in my opinion makes my opinions and tests very valid in this day and age. The R7 370 is actually a rebrand of a rebrand and isn't really anything fancy or extremely new. However, this has one positive side effect which is that the card has quite mature support in the open source RadeonSI driver. And why did I pick a card that comes with 4GB of VRAM? Well, I don't actually have a technical reason that I could come up with. I simply wanted to make sure that the card, which is in theory about as fast as my GTX 760, was at least objectively better at something. I also wanted to make a joke about Liam's 3.5GB of VRAM.

The first thing I did after booting it up was testing what kind of performance I could get out of this card. I had some older Nouveau benchmark results lying around so I figured I would pit it against my 760 in a duel of benchmarks using both the open source and the closed source drivers to compare the performance. So I ran some basic benchmarks you are probably very familiar with.

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Because of recent Mesa updates both of my cards have access to the tessellation shader with Nouveau being able to access features up to OpenGL 4.1. The R7 370 reported only OpenGL 3.3 with the Oibaf drivers but tessellation shader was found in the supported features making Heaven a nice benchmark. RadeonSI didn't perform too well and lost to the 760 with Nouveau (though just slightly) even when Nouveau could only reclock to the second highest power state. When I asked around on the IRC I was told that this could be because AMD's cards have fewer cores that do tessellation. The Nvidia blob was the obvious winner with FGLRX 15.20.1013 coming second.

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When I turned off tessellation the results changed quite a bit. RadeonSI ran twice as fast as Nouveau and was catching up to FGLRX performance. Not a bad display for an open driver I'd say. FGLRX was once again second with the Nvidia blob running quite a bit faster than its competition.

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Correction: After updating to 15.7 (15.20.1046) FGLRX started running faster than RadeonSI. Graph is updated.
Because I lack the imagination, I decided to run another Unigine benchmark. However, this is where the results got pretty interesting. RadeonSI actually beat FGLRX. I was quite surprised to see that and I had to do additional runs to verify the results. Of course the RadeonSI results were still pretty far off from the Nvidia driver.

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Correction: HL2: Lost Coast runs without graphical glitches with Catalyst 15.7.
Among the benchmarks run was Half-Life 2: Lost Coast. This benchmark isn't all that GPU intensive but it can be pretty heavy with everything maxed out. Here FGLRX was almost as fast as the Nvidia driver but those results actually are probably at least a little bit off. FGLRX, while it was running quite fast, actually had graphics corruption during the benchmark. Every other driver ran the benchmark well without any noticeable glitches but FGLRX was all over the place with terrain, sky and shadows messing up quite a bit.

I also played some games to test the card out without doing comparative benchmarks. Among these was Shadow of Mordor which currently only officially supports Nvidia because of slowdowns on AMD cards. Of course this doesn't always mean that the game doesn't run nicely, for example Borderlands 2 still doesn't support AMD but my testing had it running at 50-60 FPS after dropping a setting or two. However, here the warning is there for a good reason.

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As you can see, Shadow of Mordor on FGLRX is just a mess. The results are weird because the performance is constantly bad and the actual drop-off is pretty small going from Low to Very High. I'm not an expert but it kind of looks like there's a bottleneck of some sort in the driver itself. On Ultra the whole game crashed. So, AMD folks, I'd recommend you stay away from this particular game. But hey, at least I had plenty of memory to go about this time, right?

The disaster department also included other big games like Dying Light, which ran at 22 FPS or lower even when the settings were turned down and the game was running at 720p, and Metro 2033 Redux. However, the games that ran on RadeonSI mostly ran better with FGLRX.

So, that's basically what the overall situation looks like from purely performance standpoint. As you can see, AMD side does indeed perform worse in the closed driver space. Overall FGLRX is slower and more buggy than the Nvidia drivers. I'd say if you went with just the closed source driver there wouldn't really be a point to using AMD hardware. FGLRX is just a closed source driver but not as good as the competition. However, just speaking of the closed source driver wouldn't do justice to the best thing about this particular card. That thing of course being the open source driver.

Yes, I did showcase the performance and yes it's most of the time even slower than FGLRX but those are just performance numbers and they don't show some of the best things about the open drivers. First of all, the overall desktop performance seems a lot nicer with the open Mesa drivers. Shaking windows around doesn't result in as much tearing for example. And of course RadeonSI has the advantage of being partially developed by AMD and with AMD-provided documentation meaning that it get more out of the card. There aren't reclocking issues like there are with Nouveau and the driver seems very robust. Some of the games that crash the entire system on Nouveau run just fine with RadeonSI. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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About the author -
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I'm a Linux gamer from Finland. I like reading, long walks on the beach, dying repeatedly in roguelikes and ripping and tearing in FPS games. I also sometimes write code and sometimes that includes hobbyist game development.
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39 comments
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coryrj19951 Aug 13, 2015
Nice article, and glad to know that GOL finally has an AMD card ;)

I might have to try the Gallium-Nine drivers sometime, and hopefully with a R9 390 sometime in the near future. I can't believe the difference that makes.

I was actually able to run Shadow of Mordor on ultra high for around 20 minutes before a crash, (R9 270x 2Gb at around mid 20 to 30 FPS) but It seems that Catalyst still has a way to go to.
Those Nvidia to AMD FPS differences are interesting, are Nvidia drivers that much different in some cases?


Last edited by coryrj19951 on 13 August 2015 at 8:22 pm UTC
ElectricPrism Aug 13, 2015
Not bad for $180 Card

I'm glad GOL is getting into Linux GPU Benchmarks and I find this information extremely illuminating as this is the kind of info I've been keeping a eye out for.

We all love to support the underdog, Linux itself has always been the underdog in the gaming market until Steam showed up. I really hope AMD gives us reasons to love them with our wallets, and I hope they love us back with improving the Linux AMD Drivers.

This Friday will be illuminating aswell.
Xpander Aug 13, 2015
the situation seems pretty bad, drivers are still crap it seems.
ragtag7 Aug 13, 2015
Here's hoping AMD steps up their game for Linux!
Segata Sanshiro Aug 13, 2015
Awesome Samsai! It will be good to be able to have more game-related benchmarks in the future.

It's a real shame how much of a letdown AMD is right now, it would be great if Linux gamers had the option of an extra GPU vendor... Had a bit of a grumble about it on the survey article too because it seems that AMD users in the Linux world are declining.
BTRE Aug 13, 2015
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Nice work, I'm glad I'm not the only AMD user anymore. You should try benchmarking Talos. I'm not 100% about the rebranding/naming scheme but you should have more or less the same card as me (7870) with more vram, right? I'd be interested to see how much of a difference that makes since I also run the RadeonSI drivers.
Nyamiou Aug 13, 2015
I hope that AMD will fix this issue soon but in the meantime only those who don't want to run proprietary driver should have an AMD card. Some people end up thinking that all games on Linux have performances issues while in fact most games are running as good their Windows version (and sometime even better).


Last edited by Nyamiou on 13 August 2015 at 9:50 pm UTC
Nyamiou Aug 13, 2015
Quoting: GuestI know I'm wasting words, but for those saying they think AMD should fix it - no, at least not entirely. A driver team pumping men-hours into workarounds and such is trying to cure the symptom, not the cause: shitty code in the first place.
There are reasons that games suddenly get patched and work just fine on AMD cards, without driver updates. The bulk of the effort is actually in getting developers writing the games properly in the first place - that's where the most gains will be seen.
In my opinion, if Linux game developers and porter don't know how or don't care about making their games perform well on AMD cards that's also something that AMD should fix.

As a side note, the Steamboy that as been announced recently to release during Q4 of 2016 will run on AMD (source : http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/141284-SteamBoy-Machine-Is-Now-SMACH-Zero-And-Here-Are-Its-Specs.


Last edited by Nyamiou on 13 August 2015 at 10:08 pm UTC
opera Aug 13, 2015
Very nice to see these kind of articles (Hardware/GPU tests and benchmarks) on GOL! Please keep it up!
Guest Aug 13, 2015
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: NyamiouIn my opinion, if Linux game developers and porter don't know how or don't care about making their games perform well on AMD cards that's also something that AMD should fix.

As a side note, the Steamboy that as been announced recently to release during Q4 of 2016 will run on AMD (source : http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/141284-SteamBoy-Machine-Is-Now-SMACH-Zero-And-Here-Are-Its-Specs.

It's not that developers can't write properly for AMD cards, it's that they can't write properly full stop. nVidia have put in massive amounts of workarounds inside their driver to try fix other people's bad code - including breaking official OpenGL spec for certain programs.
Saying "I write bad code, but you should change what you're doing to make it work properly anyway" irks me.
Could AMD do a similar thing to nvidia here? Yes. Should they? No. Even nvidia had enough of it really, because it's a time and money sink, and makes maintaining their driver ever more difficult. This is why AZDO came about, and why Valve had their dev days to try and make devs write proper code.

will vulcan alleviate some of these issues ?
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