Comparison

The last time there was a direct comparison between the ATI Linux and Microsoft Windows drivers was last December in the Phoronix ATI AYiR (A Year in Review) 2005 article. For a more recent look at things, today I carried out the same Linux/Windows driver comparison. This is also my first time directly looking at the Radeon X1000 series performance between the two drivers, but for comparison sake I also threw in a second non-X1000 card. The Windows drivers used was the most recent ATI Catalyst 6.6, while the Linux version was fglrx 8.26.18. The two cards used for testing under both Windows and Linux (Fedora Core 5 2.6.17) was an ATI Radeon X1800XL 256MB and ATI Radeon X800XL 256MB.

The benchmarks used on Windows and Linux was Doom 3 (v1.3) and Quake 4 (v1.2); seeing as both of these popular games have quality native Linux ports by id Software. The system for this test consisted of an Tyan i5000XL motherboard, one Intel Xeon 5080 Dempsey (3.73GHz; dual-core; Hyper Threading), and 2GB of DDR2 FB-DIMM modules. Below are all of the results from today's tests. To be quite frank, the numbers speak quite clearly for themselves when it comes to the performance delta between the ATI Windows and Linux drivers. Even for the Linux drivers being based upon the ATI Windows Catalyst suite, the frame-rate performance under Linux is one of the critical areas for improvement in this graphics battle.