AMD's Radeon Gallium3D Starts Posing A Threat To Catalyst

First up with OpenArena 0.8.8, the performance of the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver for the HD 5830, HD 6770, and HD 6870 graphics cards was just frames behind the Catlayst performance under both Ubuntu Linux and Microsoft Windows 8.1. However, when it came to running the Cayman-based Radeon HD 6950, its performance was still close to half the speed of Catalyst on the R600 Gallium3D open-source driver.

It's been pointed out in the past on Phoronix, but the mid-range graphics card offerings tend to be where the "sweet spot" is for obtaining the best performance ratio on the open-source driver. The Radeon HD 6900 series on the open-source driver still lacks critical performance optimizations.

When comparing the Reaction game's performance under Linux between the open and closed-source drivers, Catalyst still had the leg up. However, the GH 6770 was at 82% the speed of Catalyst and the HD 6870 was at about 80% the binary blob's performance.