AMD's Radeon Gallium3D Starts Posing A Threat To Catalyst

The AMD Radeon HD 6870 graphics card on R600g was up to 89% the speed of Catalyst for the Qfusion-based Warsow game. The Radeon HD 5830 and HD 6770 were both at 85% the speed of the blob.

Running Xonotic with high quality settings for these HD 5000/6000 series graphics cards led the open-source Linux AMD driver to running at effectively the same speed as the Linux Catalyst driver, but the Windows Catalyst driver for this game is faster than the Linux binary driver.

With ultra image quality settings is where the Linux Catalyst driver was able to regain its foothold over the open-source Gallium3D-based driver. Regardless, the Gallium3D performance was still within frames of the binary Linux driver on the four tested graphics cards.