AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series Gallium3D Attempts To Compete With Catalyst

Urban Terror was quite impressive with the Radeon HD 6870 "Northern Islands" GPU and the Radeon HD 6950 "Cayman" GPU each running at 83% of the Catalyst 11.4 driver with the latest Linux 3.0 / Mesa 7.12-devel code. The Radeon HD 5770 and Radeon HD 6570 also performed similarly when making the two xorg.conf tweaks.

In the tests up to now, the Gallium3D driver has performed rather favorably, but when running Lightsmark the numbers fell behind by a great margin. Lightsmark is more graphically rich than any of the ioquake3 games and so here the frame-rate dropped to around 32% the speed of the Catalyst driver on Ubuntu Linux.