Open-Source R500 Driver Can Compete With Legacy Catalyst

Switching to Unity 2D instead of Unity allowed a 25% performance boost, but still the outdated fglrx driver was still faster for this other game that also uses the ioquake3 engine. The latest open-source Radeon driver code put the game running at 34 FPS while the binary driver was churning out 49 FPS.

Warsow 0.61 would not run on the old Catalyst driver stack, but when looking at the results between Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and the latest development code, it looks like there are some small performance improvements on the horizon.

For old R500 class hardware it looks like the open-source Radeon driver can now compete with the legacy Catalyst code, but it's too bad this isn't yet the case for newer generations of ATI/AMD Radeon GPUs.

Discuss this article in our forums, IRC channel, or email the author. You can also follow our content via RSS and on social networks like Facebook, Identi.ca, and Twitter (@Phoronix and @MichaelLarabel). Subscribe to Phoronix Premium to view our content without advertisements, view entire articles on a single page, and experience other benefits.