Open-Source R500 Driver Can Compete With Legacy Catalyst

Phoronix: Open-Source R500 Driver Can Compete With Legacy Catalyst

The latest open-source Radeon Linux driver code for supporting the Radeon X1000 (R500) series hardware has basically reached a point of competitiveness with the legacy Catalyst Linux driver that once supported this hardware. In some cases the open-source Gallium3D driver is now faster than what Catalyst once ran at while in other select OpenGL workloads there is still a proprietary imbalance.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=17433

There's a lot of FUD around here from some posters (we know who they are) regarding the open source driver. It's nice that you separated R500 class chip/driver with benchmarks and showed how they are competitive with fglrx.(any work that may still need to be done on the driver in various areas notwithstanding)

I hope in the future you will do this the same way regarding the other classes of AMD chips as well. With the progression that has taken place in the OSS drivers, it's time that the wailing and teeth gnashing started cooling down; and the OSS/AMD/driver devs didn't constantly have to run around these forums and defend themselves so much anymore.

Let's hope Q now sees the good results of the radeon driver as well instead of focusing on the bad things that Bridgman and his team do in his opinion.

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Originally Posted by AlbertP

Let's hope Q now sees the good results of the radeon driver as well instead of focusing on the bad things that Bridgman and his team do in his opinion.

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He already does. Bashing me is more of a hobby.

Deep down I think he realizes he's just "shooting the messenger" but even so it *is* a time-honored tradition.

Looks nice (does this mean they are now going to focus on just bug fixing and r600?), but what about power managment, and 2d acceleration? those things are a must for claiming they can compete.

Hey, where are the Unigine tests ;-) Too much for fglrx to handle it?
Also don't forget about dozens of new extensions available with the r300g driver, not present with fglrx.
BTW I wonder how many people except me are still using this old hardware for work and gaming.

On the other side the title is a little bit misleading, the driver is called r300g (small "r"), hardware generation is called R500 (there are also few of those typos in the article), so in the title you probably wanted to say something like "Open-Source r300g Driver Can Compete With Legacy Catalyst with R500 class hardware", however from journalists POV you title has a better sound.

Also it's pity this wasn't the latest fglrx with support for R300-R500 class hardware available :-( .

Nice article nevertheless.

Please, fix Hi-Z and enable it by default :(

Let's start to make things clear:

We don't need benchmarks of games that are crap under all aspects, starting from the graphics.

maybe chart for OSS drivers are longer, but 5-8 fps.. wtf??

Quote:

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Originally Posted by AlbertP

Let's hope Q now sees the good results of the radeon driver as well instead of focusing on the bad things that Bridgman and his team do in his opinion.

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well as a amd card customer and radeon driver user i do not really understand you here.

maybe you mixxed up my messages with the ones from PANIX ?

Today i try to install the catalyst 12.4 more than 3 hours and i fail.
but i really do it right first of all i purged the oibaf ppa then i uninstall all new kernels like 3,5 and 3.4 and 3.3 i also makes sure the "right" 3.2 kernel and all stuff was installed.
but the both the ubuntu catalyst installer and the amd installer fail to install catalyst.

and i only try this because HON is broken for me with the Oibaf PPA right now and the stable radeon driver in ubuntu 12.04 is to "slow" and do have input lag if i try to drop a intem on a allied team member.

in my testing the result is clear: the Radeon driver DIT work and the Catalyst driver dit NOT work at all

for my performance problems i need ubuntu 12.10 "stable" or a working GIT PPA