Unigine Heaven & Valley Now Run Well On Radeon Gallium3D

I must say I am rather impressed with both Unigine Heaven and Unigine Valley finally running well -- and with decent speed -- when using the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver in the soon-to-be-out Mesa 10.1.

With Mesa 10.1 that should be released on Friday, the R600 and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers (along with Nouveau) finally support OpenGL 3.3. With the GL 3.3 support, the latest Unigine Engine tech demos for Linux are running on these Gallium3D drivers. Paired with the Linux 3.13 kernel, the performance is also great. (Given the always-happening Git activity, Mesa 10.2-devel and Linux 3.14 already deliver some more improvements, but for the next round of Phoronix articles I am looking at the stack of what's shipped right now in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Newer tests will come after that but already with Linux 3.13 + Mesa 10.1 the Unigine Valley and Heaven tests are running nicely.)

There were no major rendering artifacts encountered with the AMD Radeon hardware tested thus far, but the image doesn't appear quite as crisp or stunning as when using the proprietary AMD Catalyst or NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers. In terms of the performance, the numbers are also decent but you will have to wait for the upcoming Phoronix articles to find out more.

The articles coming out in the next few days include a fresh look at several generations of AMD Radeon GPUs when using the Mesa 10.1 + Linux 3.13 configuration currently found in Ubuntu 14.04. As a follow-up article will be new open-source vs. closed-source driver results for these graphics cards on Ubuntu 14.04. Similar Intel and NVIDIA graphics tests from Ubuntu 14.04 are also being looked at and to conduct a fresh comparison of Ubuntu 14.04's graphics stack compared to older Ubuntu Linux releases.

Besides Radeon/Nouveau OpenGL 3.3 support, Mesa 10.1 also has many other great features so be sure to read about it in the dozens of Phoronix articles covering this three-month advancement to Mesa 3D. There's also a few other new Linux graphics tests coming in the next few days (including GTX 750 non-Ti benchmarks to complement our latest NVIDIA Maxwell Linux coverage), but other test requests can be directed to Phoronix via Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. If you appreciate all of the exclusive Linux hardware and driver tests done at Phoronix, please join Phoronix Premium today.