6-Way Ubuntu 14.10 Radeon Gallium3D vs. Catalyst Driver Comparison

With the Unigine Sanctuary test that's showing its age but still rather demanding on the GPU, the R600 Gallium3D driver for pre-GCN GPUs is doing a good job while the RadeonSI driver for modern AMD GPUs still has a ways to advance in competing with Catalyst... The Radeon HD 6870 was running at 68% the speed of Catalyst while the Radeon HD 7950 was at 57% the speed or the R9 270X at 65% the speed of the binary blob.

Unigine Tropics is of similar age to Sanctuary and shows that for the older generations of AMD Radeon hardware that the open-source driver performance is close to Catalyst but the newer AMD GPUs still have a ways to mature.

Warsow with the R600 Gallium3D driver was now actually faster than Catalyst but for the GCN graphics processors (sans the HD 7850) their performance was still noticeably better with Catalyst. Warsow overall though seems to be an outlier with its performance being rather in flux between the different software configurations.