AMD 2010 Catalyst Driver Year In Review

The Qfusion-powered Warsow game was quite sporadic in terms of performance for the Radeon HD 5770 "Evergreen" drivers over the past year.

With X-Video Bitstream Acceleration still being far from ideal for Linux video playback with ATI Radeon UVD2-capable graphics processors and its only exposed interface being through a closed-source VA-API front-end library, X-Video is still quite common for ATI users. X-Video though was even broken on the Radeon HD 5770 series for a few driver releases this year. The CPU usage when using X-Video on the Radeon HD 5770 series with newer drivers is actually higher than it was a year ago.

In Unigine Sanctuary there was a slight improvement between Catalyst 10.4 and 10.5, but then there was the widespread performance infection with the June 2010 Linux driver before it was healed a month later. Since that point the Unigine Sanctuary performance has been stable and is ahead of where it was performing in pre-10.4 drivers.