Is AMD's New 2D Acceleration Architecture Still Slow?

Starting with the GtkPerf tests, with the GtkComboBox widget testing its performance is more than twice as fast using the open-source Radeon driver stack. The Catalyst 10.4 and 10.4 performance was close to the same at 46~48 seconds while the open-source driver took just 19 seconds.

With the GtkRadioButton test both Catalyst 10.4 and 10.6 outperform the open-source ATI driver, but there is no significant difference between the new and old 2D acceleration architectures.

The ATI 2D Acceleration Architecture does show an improvement over the old XAA-reporting Catalyst 10.4 acceleration with Render Bench where the new 2D code-path is nearly twice as fast. However, the open-source ATI driver still has a faster X Render implementation.