An Optimized Open-Source Driver Tries To Compete With AMD Catalyst

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 12 June 2012 at 07:00 AM EDT. Page 13 of 13. 33 Comments.
AMD Radeon Massive Linux Comparison - July 2012

When moving to high quality settings with Xonotic and maintaining the 1920 x 1080 resolution, the Radeon Gallium3D driver fell further behind and was not as competitive like the low quality settings. However, for most of the graphics cards at least on the "Tweaked Git" stack, the average frame-rate was usually above 60 FPS.

For most games, the Radeon Gallium3D driver is still far behind Catalyst, but at least as the "Tweaked Git" results show, the open-source driver code is beginning to move in the right direction. Aside from the OpenGL performance, there's still much work left on catching up to the latest OpenGL specification (right now R600g is basically limited to OpenGL 2.1/3.0), OpenCL is still an active target, power management isn't yet ideal, and there's many other features left to be accomplished or completed.

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Additional Radeon Linux benchmarks are forthcoming along with other updated open-source graphics results and test requests from the forums.

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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.