An Optimized Open-Source Driver Tries To Compete With AMD Catalyst

[phoronix]

Phoronix: An Optimized Open-Source Driver Tries To Compete With AMD Catalyst

There's been a number of recent open-source driver improvements that have come about for modern ATI/AMD Radeon graphics cards under Linux, but not all of these features have yet to be merged or enabled by default (e.g. 2D color tiling, PCI Express 2.0, and HyperZ). With some basic tweaks, can the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver now compete with AMD's proprietary Catalyst Linux driver when it comes to OpenGL performance? Let's see.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=17455

[log0]

Nexuiz/Xonotic and OpenArena are looking great > 50%.

Too bad the mesa driver can't keep this performance with Doom3, Warsow and co.

Btw what is going on with Reaction Quake? Must be hitting some slow path with mesa.

[smitty3268]

Btw what is going on with Reaction Quake? Must be hitting some slow path with mesa.

It's interesting to note that the r300g hardware is significantly outperforming the r600g hardware in that test. It seemed to be about the only case where that happened, which is a lot better than things used to look.

[Linuxhippy]

That kind of benchmarks start to become boring...

[Temar]

I can't see where the optimized open source driver is trying to compete with the catalyst. The binary blob is still miles ahead.

Video acceleration is also still a problem with the open source drivers. If at least that would work, the open source driver would be suitable for HTPCs. In the current state however it is pretty much useless, except for desktop effects.

[DanL]

Video acceleration is also still a problem with the open source drivers. If at least that would work, the open source driver would be suitable for HTPCs.

Yeah, I really don't need more 3D performance and I'm so tired of waiting for Gallium3D VDPAU, especially when it's being held up for legal reasons and may never be released. I think I'm just going to swap my RadeonHD 4550 with a GeForce 8400GS from another computer. Problem solved..

[89c51]

Yeah, I really don't need more 3D performance and I'm so tired of waiting for Gallium3D VDPAU, especially when it's being held up for legal reasons and may never be released. I think I'm just going to swap my RadeonHD 4550 with a GeForce 8400GS from another computer. Problem solved..

I think you mean UVD (and proper PM) is held back due to legal reasons. The state tracker is not ready yet because there are not many people working on it AFAIK.

[enrico.tagliavini]

I wonder if enabling S3TC might improve the performance of the radeon driver. Well this can be an idea for the next article

[Ansla]

What was the problem with 3650? I own one of those and it works fine for me with both mesa-8.0 and latest git. And you can imagine I was most interested in the results for that card, as I can compare them with my own system.

[curaga]

The low-end results (6450, 4550) are really sad. Not only is catalyst 4-6x the speed, the tweaks also have little to no effect.