I see lots of advice online to just use the kernel driver for AMD cards these days, but in my experience it is slow. On some of my machines it benchmarks slower than the Intel graphics. In other cases it is faster, but only by about 50% or so. It is disappointing. I still tend to prefer nVidia graphics when I'm building my own systems because even if the driver is a big binary blob it does work.
I don't care much about performance because I mostly play strategy games, my issue with the kernel driver is it's instability, many games will hard crash my system.
