Mesa Update Makes Radeon MSAA Much Faster

Earlier this month I ran some new benchmarks of the Radeon Gallium3D MSAA support that was merged into the R300g driver. Unfortunately, the performance was very disappointing, but last week there were luckily some anti-aliasing performance optimizations that were merged into Mesa. I have now done new benchmarks of the new Mesa R300g driver with these multi-sample anti-aliasing performance optimizations, which show quite a noticeable difference from the open-source driver compared to earlier this month.

The MSAA R300 performance optimizations by Marek Olšák "make MSAA a lot faster" as explained thoroughly in the earlier article. For these new benchmarks, the Radeon X1800XT 256MB (R520) graphics card was again used for testing from the Intel Core i7 Ivy Bridge system. The original Mesa tests of R300g MSAA were now complemented by a Mesa Git master snapshot from a few days ago (git-ca39c0f) that contains the performance work for multi-sample anti-aliasing.

With the Pre-Optimization and Post-Optimization Mesa runs, the testing happened with no MSAA, 2x MSAA, and 4x MSAA. The MSAA level was controlled through the GALLIUM_MSAA environment variable.