Open-Source AMD Fusion Graphics Still Mixed

The VDrift racing game had run with the Gallium3D driver on the AMD Fusion E-350 setup, but the car's windows were white rather than their appropriate textures that are shown when using other Radeon hardware, other Gallium3D drivers, and the Catalyst driver.

Our other tests though had now worked fine with the AMD E-350 under Gallium3D, so we also ran some benchmarks.

The test system was an AMD E-350 dual-core at 1.60GHz on an ASUS E35M1-M PRO motherboard, 4GB of system memory, 64GB OCZ Vertex SSD, and the Radeon HD 6300 graphics found on the APU. In this article the Gallium3D and Catalyst driver performance is just being compared, but once this open-source support is more mature, we will also compare its performance to some discrete graphics cards.

Ubuntu 10.10 x86_64 was the operating system under test with the GNOME 2.32.0 desktop, X.Org Server 1.9.0, GCC 4.4.5, and EXT4 file-system. When testing Gallium3D, the system was updated to the Linux 2.6.39 kernel, xf86-video-ati 6.14.99, and Mesa 7.11-devel git-de48199 with all of these being built from Git on 24 April. The proprietary driver tested was Catalyst 11.3.

The Fusion Linux graphics tests included OpenArena, Warsow, UrbanTerror, Lightsmark, and VDrift at a variety of resolutions. If you are interested in the Linux compute performance for this AMD Fusion E-350 system, see our earlier Linux tests.