AMD Catalyst vs. Radeon Gallium3D On Linux 3.1

If you are not taken by today's release of Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot", here are some new Radeon graphics benchmarks comparing the Catalyst driver on Ubuntu 11.10 to the latest R600g driver from Mesa 7.12-devel on the soon-to-be-released Linux 3.1 kernel.

This round of Linux graphics benchmarks is quite straightforward. An ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB graphics card was tested with Catalyst 11.8 (fglrx 8.88.7 / OpenGL 3.3.11005; the proprietary ATI/AMD driver found in the Ubuntu 11.10 repository) and compared to the latest Linux 3.1 kernel and Mesa 7.12-devel git-6bf8c7c code. The latest xf86-video-ati DDX driver Git was also used from earlier this week. For reference, the Linux 2.6.39 and Linux 3.0 kernels were also tested to see whether the Linux 3.1 Radeon DRM has any performance impact on this RV770 GPU. This testing was done from an AMD Opteron system running the 64-bit Ubuntu 11.10 near-final ISO.

With the open-source driver, swap buffers wait was disabled and color tiling was enabled for the Radeon HD 4870.