July 2011 Open-Source Graphics Driver Comparison

Running Lightsmark on the open-source drivers from the three leading hardware vendors was most interesting. The Sandy Bridge hardware on the classic Mesa driver did much better than any of the NVIDIA hardware and most of the Radeon hardware in this more advanced OpenGL lighting benchmark. The Core i5 2500K with the Sandy Bridge New Acceleration architecture was nearly tied with the Radeon HD 4670 discrete graphics card on the R600g driver. Only coming out better than that was the Radeon HD 6570, as would be expected.

That is all for now as a teaser, until the much larger comparison comes in August or September and when looking at non-default driver options and perhaps the binary blobs as well.