Open-Source Radeon Takes On AMD Catalyst In 2D Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Open-Source Radeon Takes On AMD Catalyst In 2D Performance

Last weekend I published 2D performance benchmarks comparing Nouveau to NVIDIA's official driver. To no real surprise, the proprietary NVIDIA driver beat Nouveau in most micro-benchmarks when it comes to 2D (and separately, 3D) performance. With the open-source Radeon stack, however, it presents a much tougher fight against the proprietary Catalyst driver.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=20563

[dungeon]

Fglrx 2D is better under non composite desktop otherwise can be slow, but radeon is fine for both but better under composite at least to avoid tearing .

Other then those drivers i can say that governior is buggy like hell (have some different perfomance bugs wirt those drivers and with x86 vs x86_64, etc....). New gtk3 is also buggy, i had black elements for radeon, but not in fglrx... now they "fixed it" for radeon but broke it for the fglrx.. that is plenty of fun .

Is there some benchmarking software for gtk3, that gtkperf is gtk2 only... 9 years old as i see .

[rgfernandes]

Fglrx 2D is better under non composite desktop otherwise can be slow, but radeon is fine for both but better under composite at least to avoid tearing .

It is true only because radeonsi driver uses glamor. Glamor is slow. I haven't tested the xorg 1.16 branch glamor yet.

But with glamor it is very easy to add new cards because glamor uses the 3d functions to accelerate the 2d drawings. So the developers only to make the 3d driver to support new cards.

I liked a lot this article. It shows that the open source drivers will be faster than proprietary and faster than windows when they become mature enough.

I have tested the kernel 3.16-rc1. It seems very fast. The only sorry is it seems buggy by now but we are talking about a rc1 release.

I can't wait for the 3.16 release.

[Britoid]

This just shows how awful Catalyst on Linux actually is.

[Azrael5]

Great result!!!

[oleid]

It is true only because radeonsi driver uses glamor. Glamor is slow..

Didn't that article just show, that GLAMOR isn't slow anymore? It was as fast as EXA, which all but the Radeon 7xxx used.

[uid313]

AMD should just abandon the proprietary fglrx Catalyst driver, it sucks!

Great work all the AMD open source developers!
Great work Marek!

[Britoid]

AMD should just abandon the proprietary fglrx Catalyst driver, it sucks!

Great work all the AMD open source developers!
Great work Marek!

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_catalyst_kernel&num=1

[rgfernandes]

Didn't that article just show, that GLAMOR isn't slow anymore? It was as fast as EXA, which all but the Radeon 7xxx used.

Glamor is slow. The article shows that the catalyst 2d is just slower. It never was so good anyway.

I have nothing against glamor. I have a HD 7750, use the opensource driver and have no regrets.

But comparing EXA and glamor, glamor loses by a great margin. It has the advantage in adding new cards. EXA is hard to add new cards.

Again, I haven't tested glamor from xorg 1.16 yet.

[dungeon]

Again, I haven't tested glamor from xorg 1.16 yet.

It is faster then a lib previously (i've tried few weeks ago), but it is different too in active development and much rewritten from what glamor as a lib was... so even if you tried xserver few weeks ago it is not for making conclusion about that just yet, because today things can be different . Release is expected in two weeks i think, so we will soon all see... i expected for begining just to not have major bugs .