Testing AMD's New FirePro Linux Driver With The FirePro V8750

The SolidWorks test was 32% faster under fglrx 8.70.3 than fglrx 8.66.10.

The best improvement overall was with TCVIS, which is the UGS Teamcenter Visualization Mockup Viewset. The weighted geometric mean under fglrx 8.66.10 was 19.88, but with the newest fglrx 8.70.3 driver, this number was at 31.69, which puts it 59% faster! All that was changed was a simple Linux driver update.

Initially we were wondering whether we would see these "performance increases by up to 20 percent" with this FireGL/FirePro graphics driver update -- especially with all of our testing under Linux -- but we were certainly amazed and impressed once trying out fglrx 8.70.3. The performance improvements for workstation setups are certainly there judging by our SPECViewPerf 10.0 tests that had no problems pushing well beyond 20% improvements. With our dual AMD Opteron 2384 setup with the FirePro V8750 2GB graphics card the speed-up was most often about 33% faster. The FirePro V8750 and earlier FirePro/FireGL graphics cards that we have tested at Phoronix have already run great, but with this simple driver update, we are blown away by the optimizations they have done within their multi-platform driver stack. Judging by the speed at which the top-end FirePro V8750 is running at now, we can only wonder what kind of performance champion AMD will introduce this year when the FirePro graphics cards are refreshed based upon the Evergreen core.

Aside from the major performance improvements there is also the DisplayPort audio and stereo 3D support too. The only major shortfall of this driver is the lack of X Server 1.7 support. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS will be released next month with X.Org Server 1.7.5, and since it's a Long-Term Support release it will likely be popular with those workstation/professional users running such FirePro and FireGL graphics cards, but if they are to use a "certified" driver they will be stuck waiting around for the next workstation driver release before they can tap into this driver support. Until the next workstation update is made though, they could use the unreleased Catalyst 10.4 driver (based on fglrx 8.72) found within the Ubuntu Lucid repository right now -- it just goes without the official workstation support.