RadeonSI Gallium3D-Nine Can Beat AMD Catalyst With Some Wine Tests

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 14 September 2014 at 02:02 PM EDT. 40 Comments
MESA
The out-of-tree Direct3D 9.0 state tracker for Mesa's Gallium3D continues to show much potential for allowing Wine-based games to better perform on Linux with the open-source Gallium3D drivers.

There's a chance of this Direct3D 9 support being added to Mesa but Wine developers still appear uninterested in supporting this state tracker since it only covers Linux users, which itself is a subset of all Wine users with the program working on other programs too, and for the Linux support is bound just to those using the open-source Radeon and Nouveau Gallium3D drivers. For those going through the process of setting up "Gallium3D-Nine" and patching Wine, the D3D9 performance improvements tend to be dramatic over Wine's Direct3D-to-OpenGL translation layer.


The latest numbers we have are from Phoronix contributor "Darkbasic" sharing a few numbers from RadeonSI on stock Wine, RadeonSI with the Wine D3Dstream work, and RadeonSI with the Gallium3D-Nine code. For good measure are also Catalyst benchmarks. When running 3DMark05, RadeonSI with Gallium3D-Nine is faster than using Catalyst with Wine (as the closed-source drivers can't use this state tracker). For Unigine Tropics, the Gallium-Nine results are significantly better than the other Wine configurations on the open-source AMD driver while coming in just under Catalyst. See that forum thread and linked blog post for more details on this Gallium3D-Nine Wine testing.
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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.

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