One Year With ATI X1000 Linux Support

The last time we had compared the Radeon X800XL to the Radeon X1800XL was in our original Radeon R500 Linux preview, and at that time the cards had performed nearly identical. However, with the most recent drivers this is no longer the case, but there are still some interesting conclusions to draw from today's testing. In many of the benchmarks the Radeon X1800XT had outperformed the X1950PRO, while the NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX 256MB had continued to slaughter all of the ATI/AMD graphics cards at hand. In Quake 4, the 7800GTX had performed as much as 70% faster than the X1950PRO under Linux. Some tremendous gains have been made this past year when it comes to the features and stability of the fglrx driver, but the binary driver continues to fall behind that of NVIDIA's when it comes to the pure performance. There is currently no 2D or 3D open-source display driver for the R500 series, but there is one currently under development and more information is available at MichaelLarabel.com. There will also be prompt R600 support by the fglrx Linux drivers upon the introduction of this new series. Stay tuned for our review of the fglrx 8.35 display driver.

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