Phoronix takes a look at the performance of the AMD Radeon unter Linux 3.12

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.

The Linux 3.12 kernel brings several improvements for the Radeon DRM graphics driver within the kernel, including initial support for AMD "Berlin" APUs, DPM and ASPM power management for Radeon HD 8000 "Sea Islands" GPUs, major ring handling cleanups, replacing 3D blit code with the CP DMA / sDMA engines, many bug-fixes, and other changes. Dynamic Power Management still isn't enabled by default on the Linux 3.12 kernel. When running the RV770 benchmarks originally, it was thought the performance improvements may be due to the blitting code change or the ring cleanup, but it turns out that's not likely the cause. In fact, the upstream open-source AMD driver developers aren't exactly sure of the cause... The change in performance isn't due to DPM as it isn't enabled by default on Linux 3.12, it wasn't the blit code change to use the CP DMA engine as that's an R600-only change, there were no visual corruption/artifact issues to indicate bad rendering, etc.

  The AMD Radeon Performance Is Incredible On Linux 3.12