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Ubuntu 12.10: Open-Source Radeon vs. AMD Catalyst Performance
Michael: If you get a chance, throw in a low end Radeon card as well. And some performance per dollar and performance per watt graphs would be cool.
I appreciate your benchmarks
I wonder what the purpose of 300 fps would be. As far as I have heard the human eye will only register up to 60 fps - so perhaps a better measure would be "at what resolution does the driver performance sink below ideal fps".
This might give a different readout than just completely un-needed fps that do not give any noticeable difference for the human user.
Most of these cars have 3, 4 or even 6 outputs. So at the very least you need 60 FPS per output...
I wonder what the purpose of 300 fps would be. As far as I have heard the human eye will only register up to 60 fps - so perhaps a better measure would be "at what resolution does the driver performance sink below ideal fps".
This might give a different readout than just completely un-needed fps that do not give any noticeable difference for the human user.
It's a measurement of performance. Not all games will run at equal or more than 60 fps under Catalyst. So on radeon you'll get much less. In these tests here radeon didn't always make the 60 anyway. 60 is actually the screen refresh rate. The eyes refresh rate is I think around 13 fps, but works much differently than the screen, and even if it didn't you'd need much more than 13 fps to see smooth transitions. Besides 60 fps is the usual refresh rate, so when you have less you'll likely get tearing, choppiness or lag(if the game doesn't skip the frames).
But again, the point is to see how much better each driver utilizes the GPU's power here .. I'd say Catalyst(as expected) wins this one ..
Of course there's tweaks to make things faster, but not everyone tweaks/wants to tweak their drivers, and mostly they don't always work well or at all and can potentially cause problems(that's why they're not tweaked by default).
I have Intel X4500HD. This week I get Intel HD 4000 graphics.
X4500HD served fine, except not that fine in some 3D games. HD 4000 will serve very fine even in 3D games I play (in maybe about less than once a month), which are Free Software.
Could not be more happy supporter of Intel
I look down on "me no can reveal docs nor source because me business sucks so much me would be ruined if me's competitors would get that information".
If NVIDIA or AMD can't free the source because it would affect their business, then they deserve to disappear from the face of earth because their business just sucks big time. They are hardware manufacturers to say the least.
The stock open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver stack was used with the Unity desktop while the only change was disabling swap buffers wait from the xorg.conf.
AFAIK, OSS driver does not switch performance levels by default so the card would be running on default freqs. The specs table also says that the driver reports OpanGL 2.1 so any advantages of opengl 3+ are gone. I don't know how much work canonical backports to it's kernels, but things like pcie2.0 were enabled in 3.6 and the test uses 3.5.
All in all, OSS driver was in pretty bad position for this test. IMO the stock configuration is supposed to be stable first anything else second, and all tests ran without lockup or crash (at least none are reported).
Render the frame very fast and go back to idling, thus reducing power draw? Or, if the driver supports it, it allows you to add AA, AF or maybe AO on top, while till maintaining 60fps.
Just in general, I noticed the performance doesn't scale well with OpenGL effects compared to Catalytst. Turning on bloom alone in the new version of openarena is enough to slaughter the framerate by 1/8th on r300g. I don't have the benchmarks with Catalyst and bloom, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't get slaughtered by 1/8th.
The less OpenGL effects you stack up, the closer the open source driver gets to Catalyst.
I noticed PTS likes to turn on every graphics option, including non-default graphics options. So pay attention to the graphics option as even a single option in there can sometimes absolutely slaughter the framerate of the open source driver compared to Catalyst.
It's not that the open source driver is a lot slower, rather it's just a tiny bit slower at some effect and then that effect is getting multiplied by 100x per second which adds up quickly. Turning off the graphics option and the framerate increases multiple fold. For some games, it's just a matter of finding which switch is killing your framerate with the open source driver, and it's almost always an optional graphics option.
My graphics settings are maxed out. Still, I can't reach the low framerate I get with PTS.
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