AMD Catalyst vs. X.Org Radeon Driver 2D Performance

The Catalyst driver was far in front with the GtkDrawingArea - Circles operation compared to xf86-video-ati with EXA acceleration, but when it came to the final test of the GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs, the Catalyst driver was slaughtered. The open-source ATI driver was many times faster than AMD's official closed-source driver.

In QGears2, which is a Qt4-driven test and we were opting to use the X Render extension with it, the gears performance was slightly better with the open-source ATI driver. The xf86-video-ati driver was about 8% faster.