ATI R300/400 Linux Performance

With the new fglrx driver, the Radeon X800XL was finally able to outperform the NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT graphics card. Before the fglrx 8.41 driver, the performance was miserable compared to the 6600GT. These performance improvements were very apparent in both Doom 3 and Quake 4. The Mobility Radeon X300 improvements with the fglrx 8.41 release were also phenomenal. The X300 was about 50% faster in Enemy Territory and in Doom 3 it was as much as 12.5 times faster going from 1.7 frames per second to 21.3. In Quake 4 with the lowest available settings, the performance improvement was 54x faster! Yes, fifty-four times faster. Doom 3 and Quake 4 were not playable with the old driver on the X300, but now both games run under Linux relatively well! As we shared in our fglrx 8.41 driver preview, the AIGLX support will arrive with the 8.42 display driver next month. It's truly terrific to see the 8.41 offer performance improvements going all the way back to the X300 and should truly rejuvenate these older ATI graphics processors.

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