RadeonSI Gallium3D-Nine Can Beat AMD Catalyst With Some Wine Tests

The out-of-tree Direct3D 9.0 state tracker for Mesa's Gallium3D continues to show much potential for allowing Wine-based games to better perform on Linux with the open-source Gallium3D drivers.

There's a chance of this Direct3D 9 support being added to Mesa but Wine developers still appear uninterested in supporting this state tracker since it only covers Linux users, which itself is a subset of all Wine users with the program working on other programs too, and for the Linux support is bound just to those using the open-source Radeon and Nouveau Gallium3D drivers. For those going through the process of setting up "Gallium3D-Nine" and patching Wine, the D3D9 performance improvements tend to be dramatic over Wine's Direct3D-to-OpenGL translation layer.

The latest numbers we have are from Phoronix contributor "Darkbasic" sharing a few numbers from RadeonSI on stock Wine, RadeonSI with the Wine D3Dstream work, and RadeonSI with the Gallium3D-Nine code. For good measure are also Catalyst benchmarks. When running 3DMark05, RadeonSI with Gallium3D-Nine is faster than using Catalyst with Wine (as the closed-source drivers can't use this state tracker). For Unigine Tropics, the Gallium-Nine results are significantly better than the other Wine configurations on the open-source AMD driver while coming in just under Catalyst. See that forum thread and linked blog post for more details on this Gallium3D-Nine Wine testing.