NVIDIA vs. AMD 2D Linux Drivers: Catalyst Is Getting Quite Good At 2D

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 6 October 2014 at 04:00 PM EDT. Page 4 of 4. 14 Comments.

Catalyst is getting into good shape for Linux 2D performance while the open-source driver is too in decent shape: with the Radeon HD 7000 series and newer running on GLAMOR for the open-source driver, initially there were performance issues with this 2D-over-OpenGL library, but now most of that has been taken care of due to work done by Intel. I'll try to have some new GLAMOR RadeonSI benchmarks soon.

The area where the Catalyst driver's GTK performance was horrible was with the GtkDrawingArea widget for both pixbufs and circles with the performance being horrendous compared to the NVIDIA Linux driver.

You can view all of this 2D test data on OpenBenchmarking.org or run your own 2D Linux benchmarks with the Phoronix Test Suite.

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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.