Radeon 3D Performance: Gallium3D vs. Classic Mesa
The first Gallium3D Radeon "R300g" driver tests we ran via the Phoronix Test Suite were World of Padman, Tremulous, OpenArena, and Urban Terror. We tested (well, our software did the hard work :)) each of these native Linux games that use OpenGL at 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, 1280 x 1024, 1400 x 1050, 1680 x 1050, 1600 x 1200, 1920 x 1080, and 2560 x 1600. Note: Just prior to publishing this article we were informed by David Airlie that a number of new commits to the R300g Gallium3D driver should improve its performance even more. We are in the process of conducting new tests, but here are the results as of Friday. The new results should be even better for the Gallium3D driver.
Beginning with World of Padman, the results were rather interesting. The Gallium3D driver started out running at 32 FPS, which was maintained quite well even as the resolution increased a fair amount, while the classic Mesa degraded in performance as expected. At 800 x 600 the classic Radeon Mesa driver had an average frame-rate of 103 FPS while at 2560 x 1600 it was at just 23.2 FPS, which is actually just shy of one frame per second lower compared to where the Gallium3D driver was running. World of Padman (like the other tests in this article) use the ioquake3 engine, which is not demanding upon modern day graphics processors and the high-performance proprietary drivers. The classic Mesa driver for the Radeon X1000 series still is running a ways behind where the ATI Catalyst driver was performing for the R500 series prior to its support being discontinued last year, and while temporary, the Gallium3D performance is even lower.
To some surprise, the performance in Tremulous between the Gallium3D and classic Mesa driver were almost exactly even with the Radeon X1950PRO. This took us by some surprise that the two drivers were running so closely, but to Corbin Simpson, who developed much of the Gallium3D driver, this was not a large surprise. He and the other developers have encountered some tasks running faster under Gallium3D than classic Mesa and vice-versa. The ATI Gallium3D driver has not yet reached a state of optimization.