AMD Radeon Gallium3D Starting To Out-Run Catalyst In Some Cases

[Ericg]

That would be Jerome Glisse, from RedHat.

Knew I was forgetting someone! haha

[ElderSnake]

What I also take from this, on a slightly off-topic note, is that 13.04 Unity is looking to be much improved for gaming.

[ernstp]

Nice article!

[nadro]

Is it possible that it gained speed because Ubuntu began preinstalling s2tc?

No, it shouldn't be, because when s3tc extension is missing a texture just aren't filled by data, so texture will be just blank and nothing more. If these games have support for both compressed and non compressed textures (when s3tc ext is missing) some small performance drop may be visible, but for mid-end cards like a tested HD4830 it shouldn't be a visible difference in performance (of course it depend on textures count, but I think that these games doesn't need too much bandwith for a textures).

[Veerappan]

PS: If there's another big-name contributor to radeon / radeon-drm / radeon-kernel that has done a lot with fixing the driver up that I didn't think of off the top of my head (marek and David were the only 2), I owe you a beer as well

Others that you missed (besides Jerome Glisse, who was already mentioned):
Christian König
Michel Dänzer
Vincent Lejeune
Tom Stellard

They've been mostly working on the LLVM Backend and the SI driver which haven't been getting as much headline space, but they've been churning out code like madmen lately. Several of them work for AMD, but I'm not sure about all.

[liam]

Also, I'd be curious how much, if at all, the catalyst performance has gone up for that card over the last few years. I'd imagine some, but not much, and possibly has gone down as they would be focusing on newer cards.
Lastly, we'd need to know if the image quality settings were identical for each benchmark.
Regardless, fantastic job to all the radeon crew!

[Kostas]

Very interesting article, I sure would like to see some more focus on comparing new versions with those existing a few years ago to see the progress.

Also, am I the only one surprised by how negligible the difference between the Unity and Xfce versions was?

[aceman]

Also, I'd be curious how much, if at all, the catalyst performance has gone up for that card over the last few years. I'd imagine some, but not much, and possibly has gone down as they would be focusing on newer cards.

I think today's Catalyst does not support that card any longer. So you can't add 3 years of development to the Catalyst results in the article.

Which is another bonus for the OSS drivers.

[grigi]

The 13.1 legacy drivers does support that card, but only on X.Org 1.12 or older. So, catalyst should be working fine on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

This results is very impressive!
So what big items are left for HD 2000-4000 cards in the open-soucre drivers? OpenGL 3.3 compliance (not far off) and Power Management? Then the drivers are functionaly equivalent of Catalyst for those cards. Am I missing anything?

[PsynoKhi0]

That sure is an impressive jump in performance on the FOSS side, awesome work!