Radeon Gallium3D With Mesa 8.0: Goes Up & Down

Benchmarks in this article ranged from ioquake3 games to running Doom 3, Lightsmark, and VDrift. Unigine and the other more demanding Linux OpenGL benchmarks are left out since their performance is still far too slow on Mesa/Gallium3D even with modern graphics processors. Unigine also requires the patented floating-point support and S3TC texture compression.

With this initial Radeon OpenGL benchmarking of Mesa 8.0, the latest stable Linux 3.2 kernel was used, and the xf86-video-ati DDX Git driver was used. Swap buffers wait was also disabled from the xorg.conf. This testing of hardware from the Radeon X1000 (R500) series through the Radeon HD 6900 (Cayman) series was done from an Intel Core i7 3960X (12-thread Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition) system overclocked to 4.5GHz and running Ubuntu 11.10 x86_64. The AMD Catalyst (fglrx 8.94.5) press driver was used for testing on the binary side.