Radeon Gallium3D Still Long Shot From Catalyst

Even with the very latest driver code and setting up the few easy performance-boosting tweaks, the open-source Radeon Linux driver is still a long shot from being at the Catalyst driver levels for Nexuiz. The "updated and tweaked" open-source driver on the HD 5830 was 30% faster than what is found in Ubuntu 12.04 by default and 88% faster for the Radeon HD 6570. Meanwhile, the Catalyst driver was still multiple times faster than this latest Radeon open-source code.

When running the Xonotic game at just 1280 x 1024 with low quality effects, so it's mostly a CPU-limiting factor, the Radeon Gallium3D performance was certainly playable with ease (100+ FPS) and in range of the Catalyst driver, but based upon the conditions this isn't too interesting.

While maintaining the mundane 1280 x 1024 resolution but upping the effects quality to high, the open-source driver with Xonotic quickly falls far behind the Catalyst driver, but at least still was producing a playable frame-rate for the three recent AMD Radeon GPUs.