AMD To Drop Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 Catalyst Support

In this testing, a mid-range ATI Radeon HD 4770 graphics card was used for some quick reference figures. Additional R600/R700 Linux benchmarks will be published prior to the Catalyst support being ended.

The Radeon HD 4770 graphics card, which was operating at the same clock frequencies between Catalyst and the Radeon DRM driver, was tested in the following configurations:

- The stock open-source stack as found in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. The stock open-source driver components include the Linux 3.2 kernel, Mesa 8.0, and an xf86-video-ati Git snapshot. (For this test and the other open-source Radeon tests, disabling swap buffers wait was the only change made.)

- Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with the Catalyst 12.3 binary Linux driver.

- The same Ubuntu 12.04 LTS x86_64 installation but when upgrading the Linux kernel, Mesa (8.1-devel), libdrm, and xf86-video-ati all from their respective Git master repositories as of Thursday, 19 April 2012.

- The same updated Git stack from 19 April 2012 for the Radeon components but also enabling PCI Express 2.0 support (radeon.pcie_gen2=1 as a kernel boot parameter) and enabling 2D color tiling (ColorTiling and ColorTiling2D enabled as xorg.conf options). These are two easy and sane tweaks to boost the open-source Radeon graphics performance for some OpenGL workloads but still are items not enabled by default in the driver.

The numbers about to be shown are similar to other results conducted in recent weeks/months. Some other article for reference about the Radeon Gallium3D performance include Radeon Gallium3D Still Long Shot From Catalyst, Radeon Gallium3D: A Half-Decade Behind Catalyst, and The Most Comprehensive AMD Radeon Linux Graphics Comparison.