The Grinch That Stole The Radeon Gallium3D Performance?

So, the performance in ioquake3 games and Nexuiz seems to have the most negative impact with the current state of Mesa and the R300 Gallium3D driver.

To confirm the problem I carried out similar tests from a 32-bit ThinkPad that was running a different Ubuntu release, used a lower-end Mobility Radeon X1400, etc. But it stuck with the Linux 3.2 development kernel, the latest xf86-video-ati/libdrm Git, had the same settings between Mesa tests (including SwapbuffersWait disabled), and just switched out Mesa 7.11.2 for Mesa 7.12-devel Git.