AMD's R300 Gallium3D Driver Is Looking Good For 2011

With each game we ran both drivers at 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, 1280 x 1024, and 1400 x 1050. At each step of the way with the ioquake3-powered OpenArena, the Gallium3D driver was faster than its classic counterpart. At the lowest resolution, this ended up being 52 vs. 58 FPS while at the ThinkPad's native resolution this only meant 28 vs. 30 FPS, which is only on the brink of being playable. While the Mobility Radeon X1400 is not an exactly fast GPU, these frame-rates are still behind of where the Catalyst driver was performing in 2009 prior to the R300 through R500 generation support being dropped from this binary blob.

With World of Padman the Gallium3D driver came out on top each time, but the frame-rates compared to OpenArena were lower to the point that it would be difficult to play this first person shooter on the Gallium3D driver with an RV515 GPU at resolutions above 1024 x 768.

The biggest performance delta we have found between the R300 classic and Gallium3D drivers is with Smokin Guns at 800 x 600 where it was 33 vs. 41 frames per second. Still, in another game, the Gallium3D driver is much faster than the now-deprecated R300c. It is also worth noting that there were not any visible artifacts or rendering issues in any of these tests.