AMD Radeon Northern Islands: EXA vs. GLAMOR

Next week I will have out some interesting 2D benchmarks between Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau on the latest open-source drivers... Those results are very interesting but for some other interesting data to get out prior to the weekend is a EXA vs. GLAMOR 2D acceleration comparison for a Radeon HD 6870 graphics processor using the Linux 3.14 kernel and Mesa 10.2-devel.

This article isn't testing the in-server GLAMOR code to be part of X.Org Server 1.16 but rather the latest stable GLAMOR library release with Linux 3.14, Mesa 10.2-devel, and xf86-video-ati 7.3.0. By using a Radeon HD 6000 series graphics card, we're able to switch between EXA and GLAMOR for 2D hardware acceleration. The Radeon HD 7000 series and newer only supports GLAMOR while the older GPUs use EXA by defualt but can optionally switch to GLAMOR. Assuming your code is built with GLAMOR support, it's just a matter of setting the AccelMethod to glamor within your xorg.conf.

For kicks, on the Radeon HD 6870 I did a range of 2D benchmarks under EXA and GLAMOR and those results in full can be found on OpenBenchmarking.org via 1403138-PL-RADEONHD680. Embedded below are just some of the more interesting results from that file.
Stay tuned for the rest of the open-source Linux 2D benchmarks next week.