AMD R600 Gallium3D Is Mixed On Fedora 18

After yesterday running some Intel Ivy Bridge graphics tests on Fedora 18 as a preview of future extensive benchmarks coming from the "Spherical Cow" release, here's some tests of the AMD Radeon R600 Gallium3D on this week-old Fedora Linux release compared to its "Beefy Miracle" predecessor from 2012.

More extensive tests are on the way, but this is just the equivalent preview article for Radeon Gallium3D graphics on Fedora 18 to yesterday's Intel testing. This testing happened from an Intel Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition system sporting an AMD Radeon HD 4650 graphics card. Fedora 18 ships with the Linux 3.6.10 kernel, xf86-video-ati 6.99.99, and Mesa 9.0.1 while Fedora 17 carried the Linux 3.3 kernel, xf86-video-ati 6.14.99, and Mesa 8.0.2.

The full results for this introductory R600 Gallium3D benchmarking from Fedora 18 can be found in this OpenBenchmarking.org result file: 1301217-FO-FEDORARAD31.

The only setting/package changed from the stock environment on Fedora 17 and 18 was disabling SwapBuffersWait from the xorg.conf for both F17 and F18. Now onto some Radeon Gallium3D OpenGL benchmarks between Fedora 17 and 18:

On average, with the basic OpenArena 0.8.5 game, Fedora 18 with its stock graphics stack was about 6% faster than Fedora 17 on the Radeon HD 4650 at the span of resolutions from 800 x 600 through 1920 x 1080.

At 1920 x 1080, Fedora 18 was about 6% faster than the earlier release of this Linux distribution that's sponsored and led by Red Hat.

Interestingly, with the more graphics-intense OpenArena 0.8.8, the OpenGL frame-rate on R600g is down noticeably from Fedora 17 to 18. Fedora 18 is running at 69% the speed it was in Fedora 17 with the same hardware and same Linux OpenGL benchmark.

At 1920 x 1080, OpenArena 0.8.8 was running at less than 60% the frame-rate with Fedora 18 x86_64 compared to Fedora 17 x86_64.

On average for the Xonotic game, Fedora 18 on this R600 Gallium3D open-source GPU driver was 12% faster on the Spherical Cow compared to Beefy Miracle.

Lastly, at 1920 x 1080 and low quality settings for this open-source first person shooter, the Radeon HD 4650 was about 10% faster on this new Fedora release.

Find the result of the results in the OpenBenchmarking.org result file. Benchmark requests for Fedora 18 and other Linux/open-source software in general can be made by emailing me or Tweeting.