AMD Gallium3D Performance Is Much Better Than Two Years Ago

The Triangle workload inside the OpenGL GpuTest sees a 20% jump in its performance but meanwhile the Furmark performance has been flat-lined since Mesa 9.0 for this RV770-class hardware.

The Pixmark tests see small increases in performance with the soon-to-be-released Mesa 9.2.

Overall, the results for the Radeon HD 4890 (RV790XT) graphics card when testing every major Mesa release going back to 7.11 has been quite positive. Mesa 9.2 will be released this week and with it comes many improvements to all of the major open-source graphics drivers, in particular for the R600 Gallium3D driver. Many of the OpenGL test cases in this article saw double-digit gains in moving from Mesa 9.1 to Mesa 9.2.

When comparing Mesa 7.11 to Mesa 9.2, some of the OpenGL games saw their performance nearly doubled in this Mesa code that has evolved vastly over the past two years. While there have been lots of improvements, the performance isn't yet up to scratch the AMD Catalyst driver, but we're excited to see what's around the corner next for AMD's open-source Linux driver.