Phoronix: Karsk: Make Finding Software/Driver Optimizations Easier
When publishing ATI Gallium3D benchmarks this week that compared the performance of the Radeon HD 4870 and Radeon HD 5770 graphics cards with this next-generation driver architecture to the classic open-source Mesa driver and AMD's high-performance proprietary Catalyst driver, the results were what one would mostly expect. The Gallium3D driver was faster than the classic Mesa driver in most tests, but both drivers seriously lagged behind the proprietary driver. Even on older generation ATI Radeon graphics cards this is the case. This though has led many to effectively ask, "what's keeping the open-source drivers from performing like the proprietary driver?" It all comes down to low-level optimizations as is discussed in this Phoronix Forums thread. There are very large development teams for the different Catalyst driver components within AMD and much of this work is shared across all platforms, but on the open-source Linux side there's very few paid full-time developers and just a number of part-time, community developers to cover the entire drier stack.
When publishing ATI Gallium3D benchmarks this week that compared the performance of the Radeon HD 4870 and Radeon HD 5770 graphics cards with this next-generation driver architecture to the classic open-source Mesa driver and AMD's high-performance proprietary Catalyst driver, the results were what one would mostly expect. The Gallium3D driver was faster than the classic Mesa driver in most tests, but both drivers seriously lagged behind the proprietary driver. Even on older generation ATI Radeon graphics cards this is the case. This though has led many to effectively ask, "what's keeping the open-source drivers from performing like the proprietary driver?" It all comes down to low-level optimizations as is discussed in this Phoronix Forums thread. There are very large development teams for the different Catalyst driver components within AMD and much of this work is shared across all platforms, but on the open-source Linux side there's very few paid full-time developers and just a number of part-time, community developers to cover the entire drier stack.
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