AMD Radeon HD 4770 On Linux

With 2D continuing to be an important focus for Linux desktop users, we switched over to using GtkPerf for looking at the GTK tool-kit performance on the desktop. All of the ATI graphics cards performed roughly the same with the GtkComboBox widget test, while the GeForce 9800GT graphics card was about 15% slower than those running the Catalyst driver.

The ATI graphics cards performed better with the GtkComboBox operation but when testing out the Pixbufs performance with the GtkDrawingArea widget, NVIDIA reclaimed its lead. The NVIDIA driver with the GeForce 9800GT was substantially faster. This is not a hardware issue but rather the Catalyst driver can still use more 2D tuning and does not have a fully accelerated X Render implementation.

With the GtkRadioButton test, the NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards all generally performed about the same.