Mesa 9.1 Results Are Mixed For Radeon Gallium3D

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa 9.1 Results Are Mixed For Radeon Gallium3D

After last week delivering benchmarks that showed Intel graphics being faster with Mesa 9.1 relative to earlier Mesa 3D releases, up today are benchmarks of Radeon Gallium3D (R600g) to compare the Mesa 9.1 performance to Mesa 9.0.2, 8.0.5, and 7.11.2.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=18445

[0xBADCODE]

You see, 4650 is both ancient and weak. How about benchmarking something more interesting like HD5000/6000 GPUs? Unfortunately, for some obscure reasons, most of phoronix benchmarks for Radeon are done on such an ancient GPU. You see, these days you can't buy HD4000 GPU in unused condition anyway.

Furthermore, core i7 + 4650? Oh, that's a really decent example of very unbalanced system. Hi-end modern CPU + Low-end and outdated GPU? Really strange scenario.

[ua=42]

Hmm. I bet the reason why he uses a high end CPU when testing graphics cards is so that there won't be weird performance drops because of the cpu being under-powered.

[curaga]

High-end cpu + low-end gpu is my setup exactly

[neatnoise]

You see, 4650 is both ancient and weak. How about benchmarking something more interesting like HD5000/6000 GPUs? Unfortunately, for some obscure reasons, most of phoronix benchmarks for Radeon are done on such an ancient GPU. You see, these days you can't buy HD4000 GPU in unused condition anyway.

Open source graphics drivers benchmarks for older series Radeon HD 4000, 3000, 2000 and even older are necessary. There are no alternative drivers for these cards after amd has dropped support.

[DanL]

The 4650 is an older mid-range card, and not "ancient and weak" by any means. Radeon X300 = ancient and weak.

[Veerappan]

The 4650 is an older mid-range card, and not "ancient and weak" by any means. Radeon X300 = ancient and weak.

But still usable. My father-in-law is using my old Inspiron 6000 with a x300, and my parents were using an x600 in their desktop until a few weeks ago when the motherboard took a dump.

And I agree that a 4650 is still perfectly usable. My work desktop has a core i7-2600k with 8GB RAM coupled with a radeon 5400, which is weaker than the 4650.

[Hamish Wilson]

As others have posted, it makes a lot of sense to keep benchmarking these cards as they are more likely to have people using them with the free radeon drivers than newer ones where Catalyst is still an option for people. Besides, I am still running quite happily with my 4670.

As usual though, Larabel was light on details as to what could be slowing 9.1 down. There are vague references to it being because of the new AA code, but are new graphical features being enabled the only reason for the slowdowns? If one does not activate them, is the performance the same relative to other versions or even better (or still worse)? These are questions I would love to see explored, but I seriously doubt we will see them.

[Michael]

As usual though, Larabel was light on details as to what could be slowing 9.1 down.

No time/resources to do all that everytime myself, but anyone is welcome to reproduce the tests and explore more.

[0xBADCODE]

The 4650 is an older mid-range card, and not "ancient and weak" by any means. Radeon X300 = ancient and weak.

You can't buy it in unused condition these days as it's no longer manufactured for a while. It's almost 4 generations old. Hence "ancient".
And it's bottom of mid-range or so. When comparing to any modern GPU you can actually buy today, it would be real low end in terms of performance.