Linux 3.1 To Linux 3.8 Radeon DRM Benchmarks

After recently carrying out legacy Radeon benchmarks comparing Mesa/Gallium3D versions from an ATI Radeon X1800XT (R520) graphics card, up today is a vintage Linux kernel DRM comparison. For seeing if modern Linux kernels are still influencing the performance of this vintage ATI Radeon graphics card, here are benchmarks comparing the modern Linux 3.1 to 3.8 releases.

The recent "R300g" Gallium3D driver comparison from this graphics card across Mesa releases leading up to Mesa 9.1 showed some performance changes between releases. For this Friday afternoon article are benchmarks of Linux 3.1 through 3.8 from this same system while using Mesa Git master (Mesa 9.2-devel git-7cd248a).

The AMD Phenom 9500 Quad-Core system was running an Ubuntu 13.04 development snapshot with the Xfce 4.10 desktop environment while the vanilla Linux 3.1 through 3.8 kernels were compared from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA. Benchmarks didn't go further back than the 3.1 kernel as the system was hitting some issues with Linux 3.0. Benchmarks were handled through the Phoronix Test Suite software. As always, swap buffers wait was disabled during the testing process.

The main point of this benchmarking is to answer any questions about those with aging PC hardware -- in this case, an outdated Radeon GPU -- and wondering whether upgrading the Linux kernel is still generally having any impact on the OpenGL gaming performance of the system.