The Open-Source ATI Driver Is Becoming A Lot Faster

[marek]

The results in more challenging games which use lots of GLSL (like Nexuiz) are far more telling. It's amazing that we're that close to Catalyst.

Except that Nexuiz in PTS doesn't use GLSL. If GLSL was enabled, r300g would be totally kicking ass, it would be like twice or three times faster than r300c. Enable GLSL in Nexuiz and try it yourself: "nexuiz -nosound -benchmark demos/demo2"

[Melcar]

Nice review. Also liked the comparison to Catalyst. Is it safe to assume than in a year´s time we will get near performance parity (or better yet, better performance) in 3D operations?

[Shining Arcanine]

As someone who uses an Nvidia graphics card on Gentoo Linux, I am not sure how to interpret these results. Is Stock Ubuntu 10.10 using the open source driver or the proprietary driver?

[Adarion]

please, add CPU usage stats.

Yep, that would be a good idea.

But good to see the free drivers catching up, so soon <R600 users won't miss much performance. Though the classic mesa stuff seemed to be quite ok, too. And nobody has to stay with an outdated fglrx/distributionfor performance anymore.

[d2kx]

Nice review. Also liked the comparison to Catalyst. Is it safe to assume than in a year´s time we will get near performance parity (or better yet, better performance) in 3D operations?

No.

10char.

[Drago]

Marek, does adding multi-threading to Mesa will improve things much? I think returning sooner in gl* calls(in which that makes sense ofcourse) in the 3D app, and do driver work in separate thread(s) will improve speed of command stream flow. I am by no means 3D developer(driver or app), but my threading background from other areas tells me that. Is that right?

[L33F3R]

raise your hand if you bout an r300 card in the last 5 years.

[cb88]

I have an R350 LOL... on an AGP 2x board with dual PII .. its horribly under powered cpu wise... so multithreading with definitely help. Still haven't tried the recent updates I bet they will help alot.

openarena does good to hit 15-20fps at the very lowest settings it is the atlantis model of the 9800 though so its not nearly as fast as the 9800 with the usual 256bit memory bus anyway.

[pingufunkybeat]

raise your hand if you bout an r300 card in the last 5 years.

This driver powers r400 and r500 cards too.

And some of these optimisations will eventually land in the r600g driver, which supports everything after that.

So it's very much relevant, even if you don't think that it's excellent that they can match the proprietary driver already, which is quite a feat.

[cruiseoveride]

So when you run old hardware with games that it can barely run, then "The Open-Source ATI Driver Is Becoming A Lot Faster" ???

/phoronix fail