ATI Radeon HD 2400/2600 On Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ATI Radeon HD 2400/2600 On Linux

This week has been extremely exciting to say the least. We started by telling you about the AMD 8.41 Display Driver which is largely rewritten and offers Radeon HD 2000 product support, performance improvements, and soon will support AIGLX. Four articles looking at the R300/400, R500, and R600 performance under Linux followed that preview. Then yesterday we told you about AMD's new open-source strategy for supporting Linux and the open-source community. Well, what do we have for you today? With the 8.41 display driver we have completed some additional benchmarks using the Radeon HD 2400PRO 256MB and Radeon HD 2600PRO 256MB graphics cards. In this article, we see if these two mid-range ATI Radeon HD 2000 graphics cards are able to compete against NVIDIA's GeForce 8 series.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=10989

[hmmm]

Interesting results- would it be safe to say that a 2600xt would perform roughly the same as a non oc 8600gt under the new drivers?

[Michael]

Interesting results- would it be safe to say that a 2600xt would perform roughly the same as a non oc 8600gt under the new drivers?

Well, seeing that a 2600PRO is close to a OC 8600GT, a 2600PRO should be like the same as a vanilla 8600GT. Then the 2600XT will be a bit faster than that.

[d2kx]

If AMD is going to further improve the performance like with the Windows drivers, it is safe to say "yes". And why shouldn't this happen?

[Thetargos]

I'm happy for ATI/AMD, following real closely its progress. I may be getting a new system by November, who knows? Maybe it'll feature an ATI card instead of an nVidia one.

[deanjo]

OK I'm just as excited as everybody else on the new ATI drivers but that last 2400/2600 comes across more as a fanboy review then a impartial review of a product. The 8600/2600 cards are roughly the same price. You still have a better Compiz experience in nvidia and the 8600 still beats the 2600 in all benches. Then there is the whole issue of stability which as of yet is unproven. Only time will tell on that front. Plus it would be very interesting to see what these new ATI drivers do in wine/cedega. Until that is all tested and reviewed I wouldn't be taking the binary blob crown away from Nvidia just yet. The recommendation of buying the 2600 as a midrange card at the moment seems like a pre-mature guess to me.

[hmmm]

:) hopefully that means my 2600xt will translate into ETQW quality 1680 * 1050 @ 50 - 60 fps on a similar athlon x2 setup.... the waiting game is very painful

[Thetargos]

I would have to agree with you, deanjo for the most part. I would be a bit more skeptic about the new drivers and how the new cards perform before issuing any judgments. However, I do reckon the Phoronix guys have more insiders information about things to come and as such that may play a bit of factor and in this case in particular make it look biased.

[Ruediix]

My understanding is that AMD Chipsets have a different optimization on the PCI-Express bus than nVidia ones. How would this affect the performance of the benchmarks?

Additionally, once the over-clocking controls and temperature sensor settings are available for the ATI cards, wouldn't this allow an increase in performance?