ATI Radeon HD 2400/2600 On Linux

This week has been extremely exciting to say the least. We started by telling you about the AMD 8.41 Display Driver which is largely rewritten and offers Radeon HD 2000 product support, performance improvements, and soon will support AIGLX. Four articles looking at the R300/400, R500, and R600 performance under Linux followed that preview. Then yesterday we told you about AMD's new open-source strategy for supporting Linux and the open-source community. Well, what do we have for you today? With the 8.41 display driver we have completed some additional benchmarks using the Radeon HD 2400PRO 256MB and Radeon HD 2600PRO 256MB graphics cards. In this article, we see if these two mid-range ATI Radeon HD 2000 graphics cards are able to compete against NVIDIA's GeForce 8 series.

The Radeon HD 2400PRO we had used for testing was manufactured by Sapphire while the Radeon HD 2600PRO was made by ASUS. The Sapphire HD 2400PRO has a passive heatsink while the ASUS HD 2600PRO claims to run 20 degrees (°C) cooler than the reference heatsink. We had previously written a preview on the ASUS Radeon HD 2600PRO where you can find additional details about this mid-range graphics card. The test system consisted of an Abit NF-M2 nView motherboard, 2GB of DDR2-800 memory, AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ processor, and Seagate 200GB 7200.8 hard drive. The Linux distribution we had loaded up was Fedora 7 with the Linux 2.6.22.4 kernel and X server 1.3. For comparison against NVIDIA's GeForce 8 series we had used the GeForce 8500GT 256MB and GeForce 8600GT 256MB. The 8600GT was the GV-NX86T256D from Gigabyte and the 8500GT was also made by Gigabyte. We had also tested an older ASUS X1300PRO 256MB graphics card. Benchmarks were done in Doom 3 and Quake 4.