A Big Comparison Of The AMD Catalyst, Mesa & Gallium3D Drivers

The VDrift racing game results are particularly interesting. The classic Mesa drivers can't handle running this game with its own engine properly, but the Gallium3D R300g/R600g drivers can run the game accordingly. What is noteworthy though is that with the Radeon HD 3650 and Radeon HD 4670 graphics cards at 1024 x 768 in VDrift, their performance is actually higher than the Catalyst driver. However, for the rest, the Catalyst driver continued to run ahead while the ATI ASICs on the Gallium3D driver just resided above 30 FPS.

Increasing the VDrift resolution to 1920 x 1080 resulted in the Radeon HD 3850 joining up with the Radeon HD 3650 and Radeon HD 4670 where the Gallium3D driver was faster than Catalyst. Sadly though, this is likely just due to a bug (the Radeon HD 3850 ran at just 6 FPS with Catalyst) in the Catalyst driver as opposed to some mighty optimizations on the open-source side.