The Most Comprehensive AMD Radeon Linux Graphics Comparison

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Most Comprehensive AMD Radeon Linux Graphics Comparison

Last month I alluded to a 40-way graphics card comparison being worked on at Phoronix. This comparison is to extensively compare the performance of the open and closed-source drivers for each graphics card and to comprehensively comment on other areas of the Linux graphics driver support. Not only is the OpenGL performance being evaluated, but the thermal performance, CPU utilization, and power consumption is being looked at too. Being published today to mark the beginning of the Oktoberfest 2011 articles are the ATI/AMD Radeon results. This includes 28 of the 40 graphics cards, with GPUs as old as the Radeon X800XL and as new as the AMD Radeon HD 6950.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=16438

[airlied]

FFS you could at least try fact checking maybe you could go on a journalism night course instead of going to Oktoberfest next year

The weather channel had nothing to do with the r300 classic driver. It was reverse engineered by a team of 5-7 people over years. I dont think anyone was funded for it ever. The WC funded r100 and r200 drivers which were nothing like the r300.

[Drago]

FFS you could at least try fact checking maybe you could go on a journalism night course instead of going to Oktoberfest next year

The weather channel had nothing to do with the r300 classic driver. It was reverse engineered by a team of 5-7 people over years. I dont think anyone was funded for it ever. The WC funded r100 and r200 drivers which were nothing like the r300.

OMG, Dave! You have read the entire article??
I just skimmed through it. It doesn't tell us anything new

[mark_]

Dude... an article with 7 billion pages and (as always) no conclusion which states the most important observations after the last test.

[Azpegath]

Dude... an article with 7 billion pages and (as always) no conclusion which states the most important observations after the last test.

I read half of it, then started skimming. But one observation I quickly made (just skimming the graphs) was that there's to point in upgrading from my 4850 to a 5* or 6* since there' virtually no performance gain on the FOSS drivers. Unless I switch to Catalyst that is.

[marek]

I have found a few lies and inconsistencies in the article.

1) VDrift doesn't work, because it has non-compliant shaders that shouldn't compile according to the OpenGL standard. They can be fixed easily, though.

2) Unigine Heaven, Unigine Tropics, and Unigine Sanctuary work correctly and beautifully with floating-point and S3TC textures with Mesa on both r300g and r600g.

[Azpegath]

I have found a few lies and inconsistencies in the article.

1) VDrift doesn't work, because it has non-compliant shaders that shouldn't compile according to the OpenGL standard. They can be fixed easily, though.

2) Unigine Heaven, Unigine Tropics, and Unigine Sanctuary work correctly and beautifully with floating-point and S3TC textures with Mesa on both r300g and r600g.

Hmm, point 1 sounds interesting, perhaps I should have a look at that when I get home =)

[zeealpal]

Haha Im actually glad that I bought a Phoronix Premium membership to read this article

[karl]

I did not pass the first page as instructed by the author.
I was before a subscriber but not anymore.
I use AdBlockPlus and NoScript and I don't intend to disable them.

Question to Michael Larabel: tell me if this requirement (of either Phoronix Premium membership or no add blocking) will stay for future articles so that I know if I should continue to visit your site or not.

[disi]

Is the AMD 6970M so much different from the normal 6970? I have beautiful power management with my card using KMS etc. My xorg.conf is nearly empty, since everything can be set in sysfs.

I check later at home if those 3D games work as well. Even OilRush "runs" with the open source driver, many glitches and only 5-7 fps, but no crash