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

[kwahoo]

Am I missing anything?

Yes, you are. The article containts zero advanced benchmarks/engines. In Unigine or Serious Sam 3 R600g is still ridiculously slow...

[fioan89]

Yea, the results sure are impressive. I still remember how r600g gave excellent performance in UT2004 on medium-high settings a year back, and nowadays it would be even better. Now my R700 card is used for videos only, but even here it's very impressive - full HD content is shown on screen without any stuttering, even when the card is set on the low profile (which it is pretty much permanently for me now, as there is no more reason to go any higher).



Well, you might want to clarify that in the article, then. I wanted to make the same comment...

As I understand from you statements ,you are using your video card for video acceleration. Now my question is: how are you doing that? With Catalyst or with Gallium driver? I have a HD 4570 and now with Ubuntu 12.04.2 which uses a 3.5 kernel, Catalyst no longer support my card. For now I'm pleased with the graphics performance, but when it comes to video acceleration... everything sucks. And it seems that my Dual Core Pentium T4300 can't handle Full HD decoding.

Any advice about this problem will be more than welcomed!
Thanks.

[aceman]

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.

Ok then, but the legacy version probably doesn't get any performance improvements for some time now.

[przemoli]

Ok then, but the legacy version probably doesn't get any performance improvements for some time now.

And?

For 4xxx owners it do not matter a bit.

r600g soon will be on pair in opengl support for that gpu generation. That is what matter for users of that gpu generation.

[archibald]

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?

Power management, video decoding on the UVD and performance optimisations (the last of these being a never-ending task).

Edit: also crossfire (multi-GPU) support.

[aceman]

And?
For 4xxx owners it do not matter a bit.

The issue was if we can assume that Catalyst for 4xxx improved much since the version (from 2010) tested in the article.
My claim is that we can not, as the official version does not support 4xxx and the legacy version stopped getting perf improvements some time ago. So the usable legacy version does NOT contain 2 years worth of improvements since the test.

Yes, Catalyst for 5xxx+ has 2 years worth of improvements since the tested version, if such a card will be tested in another article.

[Sonadow]

RadeonSI and Northern Islands comparison or this benchmark is useless.

No sane person uses a 4xxx series on a desktop anymore. Except for old fogies who are too cheap to upgrade their hardware.

[archibald]

No sane person uses a 4xxx series on a desktop anymore. Except for old fogies who are too cheap to upgrade their hardware.

Surely insanity would be if I upgraded my hardware every two years whether I needed to or not. My HD4850 runs all the programs I need it to on linux - some 3D model based, some games and a whole lot of firefox. On Windows it runs the rest of my games very nicely.

Given that, why should I upgrade it?

[TemplarGR]

RadeonSI and Northern Islands comparison or this benchmark is useless.

No sane person uses a 4xxx series on a desktop anymore. Except for old fogies who are too cheap to upgrade their hardware.

I own an HD3870 with 512 MB GDDR4 memory. This gpu can play almost all the latest games at max settings. For some there is a need to lower one or two, but overall it is still perfectly usable. By your definition i must be "insane"... Thank you. Most intelligent people of course should have a different opinion than you...

[entropy]

No sane person uses a 4xxx series on a desktop anymore.

Well, without proper Catalyst support on Linux this might be actually true, I'm afraid.
But the higher specced 4xxx parts are still quite capable.
At least under Windows I had no real issues running current games on a 4850.