AMD R600/700 2D Performance: Open vs. Closed Drivers

Starting off with the JXRenderMark the first test that we ran was the Put Composition test with a 128 x 128 px size. The open-source driver stack with EXA was immediately off to a win over the Catalyst driver with both the RV670PRO and RV730. Both graphics cards with the open-source driver stack handled more than twice the number of operations.

At the simple blit operation with JXRenderMark, the open-source driver stack remained faster, although the lead was smaller with the newer RV730 graphics card. With the Radeon HD 3850 the xf86-video-ati 6.12.99 + Linux 2.6.31 was more than twice as fast as Catalyst 9.10.

With the Transformed Blit Bilinear test, the open-source driver led was immensely different. The Radeon HD 3850 with the pure OSS stack had 32,328 operations per second where as the Catalyst driver had managed just 463 operations per second. With the Radeon HD 4650 it was 17,872 versus 452 with the open-source driver still taking the lead.