Catalyst 14.4 Has Advantages Over Linux 3.15 + Mesa 10.3 Git

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 16 May 2014 at 12:00 AM EDT. Page 5 of 5. 76 Comments.
May 2014 - AMD Radeon Open vs. Closed Drivers
May 2014 - AMD Radeon Open vs. Closed Drivers
May 2014 - AMD Radeon Open vs. Closed Drivers

Well, that's where things stand today with regard to the latest open-source driver code versus Catalyst 14.4 on Linux. Sadly there's the regression that affected the GCN hardware that limited this comparison, but as always, we'll be back with new tests soon enough. Many of these OpenGL tests of the Radeon HD 5000/6000 series hardware showed Catalyst still being measurably faster than R600 Gallium3D on Mesa 10.3-devel with the Linux 3.15 kernel DRM, but fortunately there are performance improvements on the horizon. For those interested in some non-default performance tweaks plus some patches that will be merged soon (Linux 3.16) for enhancing the performance, see some of these recent non-stock tests albeit for RadeonSI hardware. Outside of performance is still matters of OpenCL/compute, advanced AA options, an extensive GUI settings panel, and other features missing or not fully implemented within the open-source Radeon Linux driver.

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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.