AMD Gallium3D Performance Is Much Better Than Two Years Ago

[GreatEmerald]

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.

Not higher compatibility, but different. Some games work better on one, some on the other.

[bridgman]

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.

spstarr, are you running with the sb optimizer (R600_DEBUG=sb <program>) ? If not, give it a try.

[curaga]

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.

Mesa has the env var overrides to disable extensions, so Michael could easily do a no-MSAA bench.

[spstarr]

New Shader optimizer

spstarr, are you running with the sb optimizer (R600_DEBUG=sb <program>) ? If not, give it a try.

I should try that, you are right...

Shawn

[marek]

Mesa has the env var overrides to disable extensions, so Michael could easily do a no-MSAA bench.

Unfortunately, MSAA cannot be disabled by environment variables completely. You can only disable the GL extensions GL_EXT_framebuffer_multisample and GL_ARB_texture_multisample, but I think you can't disable MSAA through GLX, which is what Nexuiz and other apps use.

[Sidicas]

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.

I've said that *EVERY* time benchmarks like these come up and nothing has changed. It's like comparing apples and oranges..

[marek]

It would be extremely difficult to keep track of and disable every new feature. New features can decrease performance as seen with MSAA, but they can also increase performance, which is something I bet you'd like to see in the article.