Open-Source R500 Driver Can Compete With Legacy Catalyst

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 8 June 2012 at 07:55 AM EDT. Page 7 of 7. 52 Comments.
Ubuntu Linux - Radeon X1400 - Catalyst R300 Gallium3D

Switching to Unity 2D instead of Unity allowed a 25% performance boost, but still the outdated fglrx driver was still faster for this other game that also uses the ioquake3 engine. The latest open-source Radeon driver code put the game running at 34 FPS while the binary driver was churning out 49 FPS.

Ubuntu Linux - Radeon X1400 - Catalyst R300 Gallium3D
Ubuntu Linux - Radeon X1400 - Catalyst R300 Gallium3D

Warsow 0.61 would not run on the old Catalyst driver stack, but when looking at the results between Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and the latest development code, it looks like there are some small performance improvements on the horizon.

For old R500 class hardware it looks like the open-source Radeon driver can now compete with the legacy Catalyst code, but it's too bad this isn't yet the case for newer generations of ATI/AMD Radeon GPUs.

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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.