AMD Radeon Gallium3D Starting To Out-Run Catalyst In Some Cases

[liam]

So, how many games actually use ogl 4.0+?

Also, I'd be curious how much, if at all, the catalyst performance has gone up for that card over the last few years. I'd imagine some, but not much, and possibly has gone down as they would be focusing on newer cards.
Lastly, we'd need to know if the image quality settings were identical for each benchmark.
Regardless, fantastic job to all the radeon crew!

[Veerappan]

PS: If there's another big-name contributor to radeon / radeon-drm / radeon-kernel that has done a lot with fixing the driver up that I didn't think of off the top of my head (marek and David were the only 2), I owe you a beer as well

Others that you missed (besides Jerome Glisse, who was already mentioned):
Christian K?nig
Michel D?nzer
Vincent Lejeune
Tom Stellard

They've been mostly working on the LLVM Backend and the SI driver which haven't been getting as much headline space, but they've been churning out code like madmen lately. Several of them work for AMD, but I'm not sure about all.

[nadro]

Is it possible that it gained speed because Ubuntu began preinstalling s2tc?

No, it shouldn't be, because when s3tc extension is missing a texture just aren't filled by data, so texture will be just blank and nothing more. If these games have support for both compressed and non compressed textures (when s3tc ext is missing) some small performance drop may be visible, but for mid-end cards like a tested HD4830 it shouldn't be a visible difference in performance (of course it depend on textures count, but I think that these games doesn't need too much bandwith for a textures).

[ernstp]

Nice article!

[ElderSnake]

What I also take from this, on a slightly off-topic note, is that 13.04 Unity is looking to be much improved for gaming.

[Ericg]

That would be Jerome Glisse, from RedHat.

Knew I was forgetting someone! haha

[GreatEmerald]

Yea, the results sure are impressive. I still remember how r600g gave excellent performance in UT2004 on medium-high settings a year back, and nowadays it would be even better. Now my R700 card is used for videos only, but even here it's very impressive - full HD content is shown on screen without any stuttering, even when the card is set on the low profile (which it is pretty much permanently for me now, as there is no more reason to go any higher).

I was talking in more broad terms at the end than just specific to the lone graphics card used for this article.

Well, you might want to clarify that in the article, then. I wanted to make the same comment...

[Adarion]

Sadly I don't drink sparkling wine or any other alcohol but if I would I'd open a bottle right now.
So the free driver stack is no longer called "a mess" here on phoronix?

[Drago]

PS: If there's another big-name contributor to radeon / radeon-drm / radeon-kernel that has done a lot with fixing the driver up that I didn't think of off the top of my head (marek and David were the only 2), I owe you a beer as well

That would be Jerome Glisse, from RedHat.

[Kano]

Is it possible that it gained speed because Ubuntu began preinstalling s2tc?