Radeon Gallium3D Performance Gets Close To Catalyst On Ubuntu 14.04

When running Unigine Sanctuary, still very demanding OpenGL 2 benchmark from Unigine Corp but the least demanding of their tests, the R600 Gallium3D performance was still around 80% the speed of the Catalyst driver. When testing the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and the HD 7000 series hardware and newer, the performance for this demanding test dropped to around 50% the performance of AMD's binary blob.

With Unigine Tropics, the findings were similar to Sanctuary with the R600 Gallium3D results still being quite good but many more performance optimizations are still needed to the RadeonSI driver for AMD's newer "GCN" hardware. The Radeon HD 6950 performance on R600g is also still a special-case with the Cayman GPU not running as well as the other Northern Islands GPUs.