Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 Extreme

The benefit for Linux users of Sapphire re-launching a graphics card from a previous generation is that the open and closed-source support is already mature. This $130 graphics card already has mature Catalyst support for those interested in maximum performance and features while the open-source side also has sufficient "out of the box" support in modern Linux distributions. On the open-source side there is kernel mode-setting support and classic Mesa / Gallium3D drivers.

Pulling the very latest open-source driver code is recommended (as always) for supporting the latest OpenGL extensions in Mesa, better performance, etc. In particular, Radeon DRI2 page-flipping, among other features, have landed recently with the best experience to be found in Fedora 15, Ubuntu 11.04, and other distribution updates coming soon.

In this article are the benchmarks of the Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 from the Catalyst Linux driver while in the next few days they will be joined by benchmarks of the open-source Gallium3D driver for the HD 5830 and similar GPUs.

This testing was done on a system with an Intel Core i5 2500K "Sandy Bridge" CPU, Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra, 4GB of system memory, and 250GB Seagate SATA HDD. This testing was done on an Ubuntu 10.10 x86_64 installation with the Linux 2.6.35 kernel, GNOME 2.32 desktop, X.Org Server 1.9.0, Catalyst 11.3, NVIDIA 270.30, GCC 4.4.5, and an EXT4 file-system.

For comparison to the Radeon HD 5830 we benchmarked some of the similar graphics cards that we had on hand. These included the Radeon HD 4830 512MB, Radeon HD 5770 1GB, Radeon HD 6870 1GB, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768MB. Benchmarks in this article via the Phoronix Test Suite included Nexuiz, Warsow, Lightsmark, Unigine Tropics, and Unigine Heaven.