Radeon Gallium3D Improvements Compared To Legacy Catalyst

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Radeon Gallium3D Improvements Compared To Legacy Catalyst

Recently I published OpenGL benchmark results on Phoronix showing the open-source R600 Gallium3D driver competing with Catalyst for Radeon HD 5000/6000 series graphics cards. For the Radeon HD 7000 series and newer "GCN" graphics cards that are supported by the different RadeonSI driver, the performance has a ways to improve. What wasn't included with those recent Phoronix articles were looking at the performance for the Radeon HD 4000 series GPUs, which is now only supported by the open-source driver and the Catalyst Legacy driver that doesn't work on modern Linux distributions. Therefore, for this article we're looking at the Catalyst Legacy performance on Ubuntu 12.10 (as well as its open-source R600g driver at the time) and compare it to the OpenGL performance found out of the box on Ubuntu 13.10 and then with the latest Linux 3.12 and Mesa 10.0 driver code.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=19316

[ua=42]

While these benchmarks don't apply for my hardware (HD7800 series), its still interesting seeing how far the driver has advanced for older hardware.

[GreatEmerald]

The Daemon-powered Unvanquished game is much faster with the Ubuntu 13.10 drivers than the open-source state one year ago with Ubuntu 12.10, but the Catalyst blob was still faster.

By a frame?..

[Andrecorreia]

and

By a frame?..

by a frame an half lol

[Ericg]

Isn't the 4870 the card that everyone always asks Michael "Whats wrong with your card?" because its performance numbers are out of whack with similar cards?

[oleid]

by a frame an half lol

\begin{irony}
If that is not reason enough to use Catalyst....
\end{irony}

[edoantonioco]

In my case, I think source games runs a bit better (hd42000) in linux free driver than in windows (thats something)

I dont understand how AMD leave us without legacy driver support, that should be illegal, we bought their hardware, and they dont give us updated drivers. Thats not fair at all.

[oleid]

I dont understand how AMD leave us without legacy driver support [...]

There isn't?

[boot]

There isn't?

Hasn't been updated since January.

With these requirements: Automated installer and Display Drivers for Xorg 6.9 to Xserver 1.12 and Kernel version up to 3.4

[sandain]

In my case, I think source games runs a bit better (hd42000) in linux free driver than in windows (thats something)

I dont understand how AMD leave us without legacy driver support, that should be illegal, we bought their hardware, and they dont give us updated drivers. Thats not fair at all.

They are providing updated drivers via the OSS radeon driver, nearly fully supporting your hardware [1]. Why should they be required (by law!?!) to maintain two drivers when they have given us (the OSS community) a much better solution than originally provided by fglrx? Besides, if you still want to run the fglrx legacy driver, no one is stopping you from running it on the still supported Ubuntu 12.10.

[1] Geometry shaders are a WIP, AFAIK. OpenCL support for this class of hardware may never happen. CrossFire support may end up happening via a generic path provided by the DRM render nodes work, but AFAIK noone is working on this.