The latest Linux graphics testing under the microscope at Phoronix is comparing the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS vs. Windows 8.1 performance with all available updates. Results from Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD hardware is coming up next week while today is a bit of a preview of the AMD numbers when using a Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" graphics card. While the open-source AMD Hawaii support remains broken, with the Catalyst 14.4 driver on each operating system, the Linux Catalyst driver with the R9 290 graphics card can outperform Windows 8.1 Pro with some OpenGL games and benchmarks.

Data from many AMD Radeon graphics cards between Ubuntu 14.04 and Windows 8.1 will be posted in the next article, with this article just looking at the high-end Radeon R9 290 GPU given that it's been problematic under Linux in the past but with Catalyst 14.4 things seem to be a bit better. With the latest drivers a fresh round of direct testing against NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver with their high-end GPUs will be needed to see if NVIDIA is still whipping AMD on Linux gaming performance in the high-end space, but at least between Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 14.04 with Catalyst 14.4 on each, Linux has some advantages with OpenGL.