ATI v8.22.5 Display Drivers

As with all Linux drivers, we did not let these early drivers pass us without running our share of Linux-native gaming benchmarks. Used this month for the basis of our system was the Tyan Tomcat i7230A S5160 motherboard. The Tyan LGA-775 motherboard is powered by Intel's Mukilteo and ICH-7R making it a server/workstation motherboard, but nevertheless is supportive of all the latest components from Intel's Pentium D series to DDR2-667 and dual PCI Express x16 slots. Due to an ATI and Fedora Core 4 conflict, we were forced to use the non-SMP version of the Linux kernel. Below is the rundown of system components.

Highlighting the v8.22.5 graphics performance against that of the previous v8.21.07 drivers is Enemy Territory, Doom 3, Quake 4, and X2 - The Threat. The first three benchmarks are our usual line-up, however, with the fourth BETA candidate of X2 - The Threat is now available from Linux Game Publishing inside of their closed testing community. X2 - The Threat should be released to the Linux public in the relative near future, and this fourth BETA appends ATI commercial driver support. Due to the v8.22.5 release not being of major significance on ATI's roadmap, we simply used the previous January's 2006 candidate (v8.21.07) for comparative numbers and limited the benchmarks to nine. The ATI X800XL 256MB part used in testing ran at its stock frequencies, and the benchmarks settings remained in many varieties to ensure a wide-array of testing environments. With the driver now supporting the Linux 2.6.15 kernel, we also ran our v8.22.5 drivers on this newer kernel in addition to the 2.6.14 to compare against the previous driver. Also, X2 – The Threat BETA 4 in our tests would experience a kernel fault when using the 2.6.14 kernel combined with the newer drivers, thus we were required to use this newer version. On the following page are all of our results as well as final remarks regarding ATI's v8.22.5 Linux display drivers.