R600 Gallium3D Loses To AMD Catalyst Legacy Driver On Windows 8

[phoronix]

Phoronix: R600 Gallium3D Loses To AMD Catalyst Legacy Driver On Windows 8

For those ATI/AMD customers with graphics cards of the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 generations, they are supported by the "Catalyst Legacy" driver but this older proprietary driver branch is seldom updated for new Linux kernel and X.Org Server releases. Thus, the only real option for those with these older Radeon GPUs is to use the open-source Radeon Gallium3D graphics driver. But how does this driver compare to the still-maintained Catalyst Legacy driver for Windows 8? Here are some benchmarks.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=18964

[oliver]

Ouch. Didn't see that one comming. Sad, but lets test it again in a year

[przemoli]

Its "high end"? r600g maybe wont ever get enough optimizations (backend for radeonSI changed, and will be main focus now), to suprass Catalyst in support for GPUs requiring lots of them.

[sireangelus]

yet again.. MICHAEL... FRAME LATENCY IS IMPORTANT NOT ON AVERAGE, BUT ON THE FREQUENCY OF THE SPIKES, ERGO AN HIGHER FRAME LATENCY AVERAGE WITH WAAAY LESS LATENCY SPIKES IS BETTER THAN LOWER AVERAGE WITH LOTS OF SPIKES

[GreatEmerald]

And now how does the Windows 8 catalyst compare to the Linux one? They're not exactly the same, and the legacy Catalyst for Linux still exists, even if it requires downgrading the X server.

[plantroon]

lockups

radeon hd 3650 still gets lockups while or after running games/3D apps on free drivers (it's random but once u start 3D app it's 100% of getting a lockup within an hour)

[TemplarGR]

Useless comparison... Apples to oranges...

[wargames]

Framerate speed is not the only thing that matters in a graphics driver. In Windows 7, Blender feels much more responsive, and selecting objects takes less than a second, whereas in Linux (with the lastest open source AMD drivers) sometimes it takes more than 5 seconds to select a different object.

[przemoli]

yet again.. MICHAEL... FRAME LATENCY IS IMPORTANT NOT ON AVERAGE, BUT ON THE FREQUENCY OF THE SPIKES, ERGO AN HIGHER FRAME LATENCY AVERAGE WITH WAAAY LESS LATENCY SPIKES IS BETTER THAN LOWER AVERAGE WITH LOTS OF SPIKES

Second that.

For latency avrg is equal to avrg FPS... Here is some good article about good methodology for couting and comparing latency:

http://techreport.com/review/21516/inside-the-second-a-new-look-at-game-benchmarking

Hope its easy enought to integrate into PTS.

[log0]

Framerate speed is not the only thing that matters in a graphics driver. In Windows 7, Blender feels much more responsive, and selecting objects takes less than a second, whereas in Linux (with the lastest open source AMD drivers) sometimes it takes more than 5 seconds to select a different object.

AFAIK Blender is using GL_SELECT which is not hardware accelerated in mesa. There has been a mesa patch though I think.