Radeon Gallium3D: A Half-Decade Behind Catalyst?

With enough coverage of the Catalyst drivers for this article and no support being available since March of 2009, the testing then continued with where the open-source support is at today for the Mobility Radeon X300 (RV370). Ubuntu 11.10 was tested with its default open-source stack -- namely the Linux 3.0 kernel and Mesa 7.11. Additionally, the Ubuntu 11.10 stack was upgraded to the latest Radeon graphics components and re-tested. These updated components included the Linux 3.2.1 kernel, xf86-video-ati Git DDX, and Mesa 8.0-devel.

During this testing swap buffers wait was disabled but all other settings for both drivers remained at their defaults. What these results show is the Catalyst Linux driver performance from early 2006 through early 2009 and in comparison is the Radeon Gallium3D stack from 2011/2012 to show where the same hardware with the same tests is running at now with the open-source driver being the only support option.