How well will the AMD Radeon HD 7950 gpu perform on Linux?-Collection of common programming errors

There are some minor issues with AMD’s proprietary drivers.

They are missing a key protection routine (robust shaders) so you can’t run WebGL or OpenGL Shader CSS without risking exploits. (These are turned off in Chrome if you have an ATI card.)

Flash has stopped supporting 3D acceleration altogether in Linux due to security exploits. Hopefully they will resolve this soon.

Notably the HD 5xxx series now runs almost as fast for OpenGL with the Open Source Gallium3D Mesa drivers. The HD 4xxx series actually runs faster, but I wouldn’t recommend getting an HD 4xxx card because of this, because it is still slower than the newer cards, and lacks many features that the newer cards have.

The only real issue left on the HD 6xxx series is optimizing the drivers. This is a slow work in progress. It is currently usable, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

The HD7xxx is a no-go on open source drivers. While minimal support is handled, many routines features are not completed yet, and are either handled in software or through bottleneck producing workarounds. This is not to say there won’t ever be support.

The Open Source drivers do not, however, have good OpenCL (Open Compute) support. You need the proprietary drivers to run that.