AMD 2010 Catalyst Driver Year In Review

Immediately with the Lightsmark results the 13 AMD Linux drivers tested produced some interesting results. The Catalyst 10.12 driver is marginally faster than a year ago with this OpenGL lighting benchmark, but it is not at the highest point over the past year. The Catalyst 10.4 and 10.5 drivers were the fastest point for Lightsmark before there was a massive performance regression to be found in Catalyst 10.6 and then mostly recovered in Catalyst 10.7, but not to the point it was with the April and May drivers. Since Catalyst 10.7, the performance in Lightsmark has been stable.

The Nexuiz results were interesting over the past year of Catalyst Linux drivers, but like the Lightsmark results, there was a temporary regression found with the Catalyst 10.6 driver.

The OpenArena results for the Catalyst driver with the Radeon HD 5770 graphics card were fairly interesting. While this ioquake3-powered game is fairly CPU limited, there was a large performance boost found between the Catalyst 10.3 and 10.4 drivers. This is similar to the Lightsmark results where there was a boost in performance, but with OpenArena it was even more noticeable at the 2560 x 1600 resolution. Again, like the Lightsmark results, there was a big performance regression to be found in Catalyst 10.6, but then recovered in Catalyst 10.7. Now with Catalyst 10.12 we are near a high point for AMD's proprietary Linux driver.