GLAMOR + RadeonSI 2D Acceleration Is Quite Good For Open-Source AMD 2D Performance

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 29 April 2015 at 12:18 PM EDT. Page 1 of 3. 19 Comments.

Yesterday I posted some benchmark results showing the AMD Radeon R9 290 graphics card on Ubuntu 15.04 and comparing the Catalyst driver to the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as found on this new Linux distribution release. The previous article focused on the OpenGL performance while today's article is looking squarely at the 2D performance.

Today's numbers are looking at the 2D performance, which on the open-source side is the GLAMOR acceleration support built into X.Org Server 1.17 and relying upon the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for accelerating the 2D drawing. With the Catalyst driver remains their proprietary 2D acceleration. When it comes to the user-experience, both AMD Linux drivers tend to work well for 2D. Anecdotally, in our forums and elsewhere, AMD Linux users tend to say the 2D Linux desktop experience is better with the open-source drivers over Catalyst.

2D RadeonSI vs. Catalyst X.Org Performance

Like yesterday's tests, these numbers were obtained from a Radeon R9 290 Hawaii graphics card and then a R9 270X for going one generation older. All of the benchmarks were obtained using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software with different Qt and GTK micro-benchmarks. The same software versions were used as in the previous OpenGL testing article.


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