Radeon 2D Performance On Fedora 21: EXA vs. GLAMOR

Here's some benchmarks done of the open-source Radeon driver stack in Fedora 21 to compare the performance of the EXA and GLAMOR 2D acceleration methods.

These quick weekend benchmarks were comparing EXA and GLAMOR on the Radeon HD 6870 graphics card. The Radeon HD 7000 series hardware and newer (with RadeonSI Gallium3D) only supports GLAMOR -- 2D over OpenGL -- for 2D acceleration. The Radeon HD 6000 series hardware and older meanwhile has the dedicated 2D code-paths to support EXA by default while GLAMOR can be enabled via the xorg.conf if you wish. Fedora 21 has the X.Org Server 1.16 release and with its post-alpha updates was the Linux 3.17 nodebug Rawhide kernel.

While the old Radeon EXA code used to have major performance wins over GLAMOR, thanks to GLAMOR continuing to be optimized (with most of that work being done by Intel), the performance of EXA vs. GLAMOR in these tests is fairly close. Find all of the system information and benchmark results via 1409269-LI-2DFEDORA286.