The Most Comprehensive AMD Radeon Linux Graphics Comparison

Radeon X800XL: The oldest graphics card being tested in this Radeon comparison is a PCI Express version of the Radeon X800XL. The Radeon X800XL launched in late 2004, back in the days of 100+ nm manufacturing processes. It's the R430 GPU used by this graphics card that supports up to OpenGL 2.1. This particular graphics card is from PowerColor with an after-market Arctic Cooling heatsink and had 256MB of GDDR3 video memory with a 400MHz core clock and 980MHz memory clock.

The proprietary Catalyst driver ended its support for all ATI GPUs older than the R600 (Radeon HD 2000 series) generation in early 2009. As a result, users of a modern Linux desktop are now limited to using the open-source driver as the Catalyst 9.3 driver that was the last to support these old GPUs no longer supports modern Linux kernels and X.Org Servers. Fortunately, the open-source support for the R300/400 era graphics processors is very mature. The open-source support has been around for years and the R300/400 series had open-source support even before AMD's official open-source strategy for R500+ ASICs, thanks in large part to The Weather Channel sponsoring the support. The initial 3D support came via the classic Mesa R300 driver, but now we are living in a Gallium3D world. The R300 Gallium3D driver that began as a Google Summer of Code project is what enables modern OpenGL support for the Radeon X800XL and all Radeon GPUs through the Radeon X1000 (R500) series. The R300 Gallium3D driver is the default Mesa driver for this hardware and thus used as the default user-space driver for this hardware in modern desktop Linux distributions.

The R300 Gallium3D driver is stable and effectively feature complete. It still receives bug-fixes and small enhancements from time-to-time, but most Mesa developers are now focused on the R600 Gallium3D driver for more modern GPUs. The most recent tests previous to this article showed that on these older GPUs, in many cases the Gallium3D driver plus modern Linux kernel DRM can allow the graphics processor to operate at 70~85% the speed of the Catalyst driver from early 2009.