Mesa 9.1 Results Are Mixed For Radeon Gallium3D

After last week delivering benchmarks that showed Intel graphics being faster with Mesa 9.1 relative to earlier Mesa 3D releases, up today are benchmarks of Radeon Gallium3D (R600g) to compare the Mesa 9.1 performance to Mesa 9.0.2, 8.0.5, and 7.11.2.

The benchmarks in this article are from an Intel Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition system with an ATI Radeon HD 4650 512MB graphics card installed to represent a mid-range graphics card that is compatible with the R600g driver. The Git branches of Mesa 7.11/8.0/9.0/9.1 were used to provide Mesa 7.11.2 git-1bdf31e, 8.0.5 git-a8ff9a4, 9.0.2 git-0f687f8, and 9.1-devel git-22233da. Testing was done in its stock package settings of Ubuntu 13.04 aside from disabling swap buffers wait.

In addition to using the different Mesa Git branches, xf86-video-ati was used from Git and a Linux 3.8 kernel snapshot was pulled in for this R600 Gallium3D benchmarking. For making these tests even more interesting, most of the Linux OpenGL games / test profiles used were run at a range of resolutions for each Mesa release. All testing was facilitated via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software.