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

The classic ATI drivers had problems running Lightsmark at 1024 x 768 (but not at 1920 x 1080), but the Gallium3D performance for this OpenGL lighting benchmark is awful with the open-source code compared against Catalyst.

The classic Mesa driver could run Lightsmark at 1920 x 1080, but the textures were awful (see screenshot at end of article) that resulted in an artificially inflated frame-rate for the driver. The Gallium3D driver performance for Lightsmark continued to be awful (under 5 FPS for a Radeon HD 4870).