AMD's R300 Gallium3D Driver Is Looking Good For 2011

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD's R300 Gallium3D Driver Is Looking Good For 2011

After years of development work by Tungsten Graphics (now VMware) and the open-source community at large, the Gallium3D driver architecture is finally getting ready to really enter the spotlight of the normal Linux desktop user. With the recent Mesa 7.9 release, the open-source ATI developers switched their R300 driver (that supports up through R500 ASICs, the Radeon X1000 series) from the classic Mesa to their newer Gallium3D driver as the default choice. Vendors are now preparing to do the same as well within Fedora and other distributions, and it was just agreed upon this week Ubuntu 11.04 will use R300g. There will finally be a real, common hardware driver that is based upon Gallium3D and is used by mass amounts of people on a daily basis in a production environment.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=15397

[allquixotic]

Hmm, hasn't Fedora been shipping Gallium3d-based Nouveau drivers for a while now? Maybe you meant, finally a distro is shipping an ATI driver running on Gallium3d...

[Michael]

Hmm, hasn't Fedora been shipping Gallium3d-based Nouveau drivers for a while now? Maybe you meant, finally a distro is shipping an ATI driver running on Gallium3d...

With Fedora 13 if I remember right you still need to install the experimental 3D driver package for the Gallium3D driver, though in F14 it might be there by default.

[Beiruty]

Why didn't you include the 9.3 close source driver benches?
How much is the open source vs closed source? 0.3X?

[r1348]

Hmm, hasn't Fedora been shipping Gallium3d-based Nouveau drivers for a while now? Maybe you meant, finally a distro is shipping an ATI driver running on Gallium3d...

As of Fedora 13, you need to install mesa-dri-drivers-experimental to enable it.

[loonyphoenix]

I would love to see a comparison of some low-end Radeon r300g vs different generations of Intel graphics with open-source drivers. What's the best quality/price in the budget segment? Also, a table with supported features would be nice in addition to the benchmarks.

[TheCycoONE]

At least for Warsow it looks like r300c improved a lot: almost 20fps on 1400x1050 now vs around 3fps when you compared 10.04 to the catalyst drivers: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...allium3d&num=2

I'm curious as to what caused this large jump (whereas r300g is pretty close to where it was)

[bridgman]

I would love to see a comparison of some low-end Radeon r300g vs different generations of Intel graphics with open-source drivers. What's the best quality/price in the budget segment? Also, a table with supported features would be nice in addition to the benchmarks.

The open source drivers are not multi-threaded AFAIK, so single-thread CPU power probably makes a big difference in the performance results. It would be great if the same CPU could be used across a series of benchmarks so that the driver/hardware differences could be isolated.

[smitty3268]

So comparing to the old Catalyst results it would seem r300g is roughly half as fast, at least on this very weak card. That's not great, but it's actually not that bad either. It would be interesting to see if the page flipping work helps much. Also, i'm not sure if 2d tiling is working or if it's still just 1D.

[mat69]

I don't get it, why only Quake-Engine games?

What about Freespace 2 or games based on that engine, or Spring based games?
Or some free racing games or flight simulation games?

The results would mean a lot more than they do now.