Radeon R600/RadeonSI Gallium3D Git Code Delivers Performance Improvements

It's been several weeks since last publishing any Mesa/LLVM Git benchmarks with AMD Radeon graphics cards so for this weekend article are some fresh OpenGL graphics performance tests when running with Mesa 10.6-devel Git and LLVM 3.7 SVN atop the stable Linux 3.19 kernel.

For this testing a clean install of Ubuntu 14.10 x86_64 was used for testing that was upgraded to the Linux 3.19.0 stable kernel. Tested first on the graphics cards was the stock user-space graphics stack with Mesa 10.3.2. Following that default Ubuntu 14.10 experience (sans the newer kernel) was then using the Padoka PPA for easily fetching a recent Mesa 10.6-devel Git snapshot built against a recent LLVM 3.7 SVN version for the newest AMD GPU LLVM back-end. This upgrade also bumped the xf86-video-ati DDX from v7.4.0 to v7.5.99 Git.

Originally the plan was for a large AMD GPU comparison given the time elapsed since my previous comparison, but when getting to the Radeon R9 290 testing it seems to have regressed as the re-clocking ended up breaking mid-way through testing and thus delivering poor performance. So for this Saturday article I ended up just running some OpenGL tests from a Radeon R9 270X on the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and the Radeon HD 6950 graphics card for some R600 Gallium3D driver exposure.

All of these OpenGL benchmarks were done via the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. More updated Mesa tests are coming shortly; there haven't been too many recently due to just being busy building the new server room but that's almost complete.