AMD Gallium3D Performance Is Much Better Than Two Years Ago

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Gallium3D Performance Is Much Better Than Two Years Ago

With the imminent release of Mesa 9.2, out this morning are Radeon "R600" Gallium3D driver benchmarks comparing Mesa Git master (9.3-devel) to Mesa 9.2 Git, Mesa 9.1.6, Mesa 9.0.3, Mesa 8.0.5, and Mesa 7.11.2. These are the past two years worth of Mesa releases and testing occurred on an ATI Radeon HD 4890 (RV790XT) graphics card.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=19068

[mendieta]

Nice, and actual improvements are MUCH, much better. All of these tests were run with the latest kernel and different versions of userspace (Mesa). If each test for a given Mesa version would be run with the current kernel version at the time it was released, results would be both more realistic, and much more impressive.

[GreatEmerald]

Would have been nice to see how the power usage changed as well, if the last ones have DPM enabled.

[duby229]

Would have been nice to see how the power usage changed as well, if the last ones have DPM enabled.

I doubt it, Michael doesnt change from defaults and even if he did, he used the same kernel for all tests. It isnt at all realistic because of that. When people were using 7.11 they definitely werent using that kernel.

[peppercats]

half the tests have massive regressions

[agd5f]

half the tests have massive regressions

As noted in the article the changes are likely due to newer features (like MSAA) being available on newer versions of the driver. Older versions of the driver only supported GL 2.1 while newer versions support GL 3.1.

[Vim_User]

As noted in the article the changes are likely due to newer features (like MSAA) being available on newer versions of the driver. Older versions of the driver only supported GL 2.1 while newer versions support GL 3.1.

IMHO, then tests with these games are useless if you want to show performance differences between driver versions and shouldn't be used. If you want to benchmark different driver versions you change nothing but the driver versions. Using different game settings (even if they are applied automatically) for the different driver versions distorts the benchmark and makes them useless.

[Ericg]

IMHO, then tests with these games are useless if you want to show performance differences between driver versions and shouldn't be used. If you want to benchmark different driver versions you change nothing but the driver versions. Using different game settings (even if they are applied automatically) for the different driver versions distorts the benchmark and makes them useless.

Which i agree with. But no one has stepped up to the plate and created a PROPER (eg NOT driconf) configuration utility for the open source drivers.

[spstarr]

Maybe test Second Life?

If there's one game I've played off and on is SL and its performance is poor on my HD 3650. I don't buy these performance improvements in Gallium 3D for this specific GPU. I'd like to see more intensive games that really stress the OpenGL stack show improvements.

Michael maybe try Second Life in your test suite? It's quite demanding for shaders and things.

[gururise]

Excellent article!!

The ONLY thing keeping me on Catalyst Legacy (instead of r600) in Ubuntu 13.04 is that I had trouble running some of my Humble Bundle games with the OSS drivers (ie. Dungeon Defenders, Shank, Shank2, etc), while the catalyst legacy was able to handle them w/o problems. Also, the Catalyst seems to run Wine with higher compatibility than the OSS drivers.