Radeon Gallium3D With Mesa 8.0: Goes Up & Down

The Lightsmark benchmark with Mesa 8.0 was unstable for the Cayman GPU. However, for the Radeon HD 5750 (Evergreen) graphics card the Mesa 8.0 release does improve the OpenGL lighting benchmark performance, albeit the open-source stack is still running at less than half the Catalyst frame-rate. With the Radeon HD 3850, there was only a small change in performance from Mesa 7.11 to the current Mesa 8.0 branch, but its performance was closer to where it is at with the latest Catalyst driver. The Radeon HD 4670 performance meanwhile seems to regress with the newer Mesa code.

At 1920 x 1080, the OpenArena frame-rate with the Radeon HD 6950 and Radeon HD 3850 graphics cards are both boosted by Mesa 8.0. The Radeon HD 4670 performance meanwhile regresses under Mesa 8.0. The Radeon X1800XL performance with R300g was unchanged. The Catalyst driver remains much, much faster than the open-source alternative.