The Major Open-Source ATI Improvements Over Two Years

When increasing the World of Padman test resolution to 1400 x 1050, the open-source ATI R300g stack as found in Ubuntu 11.04 (and Git) is now faster than Catalyst! This test shows the latest open-source ATI code being 34% faster than the old Catalyst driver that still supported ATI R300/400/500 components.

With the Urban Terror game at 1400 x 1050, the latest open-source ATI code is not faster than Catalyst on Linux. At least it shows the open-source driver performance continually improving over the past two years. Compared to Ubuntu 9.04, the performance in Ubuntu 11.04 for this Radeon X1000 series GPU is up by 2.33x! The biggest delta is between Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04, which should excite many open-source ATI users who have not yet upgraded to the Ubuntu 11.04 packages (or otherwise pulled Mesa 7.10+ and Linux 2.6.38+). In this particular example, the Catalyst driver still has a 42% advantage.