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

The open-source ATI driver loses out to the proprietary competition with the x11perf test of filling a 300 x 300px AA trapezoid, but the new 2D acceleration architecture provides no quantitative benefits in this area.

With Catalyst 10.6 the 500px compositing from pixmap to window performance drops significantly compared to Catalyst 10.4, which actually makes it slower than the open-source ATI Linux driver found in Ubuntu 10.04.

As you can see from these eight tests, the performance of the Catalyst 10.6 driver with the new ATI 2D Acceleration Architecture is actually still slower than the open-source ATI Radeon driver stack found in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS for the ATI R700 graphics card. In some of the 2D synthetic tests there is actually a drop in performance compared to AMD's older 2D Linux acceleration code, but overall from using this new 2D acceleration architecture in the real-world it seems and feels faster, which is a sentiment shared by many of those using this new 2D acceleration architecture once upgrading their Catalyst driver.