AMD Radeon R600 Gallium3D Performance Over The Past Two Years

First up was the very basic OpenArena 0.8.5 game (not the current v0.8.8 release) that for even the open-source drivers becomes CPU bottlenecked. The frame-rate with the Radeon HD 6870 has certainly gone up over time, but the best performance wasn't out of the very latest driver code. The best performance was found with Linux 3.19 and Mesa 10.5 atop Ubuntu 15.04 while switching over to the latest Git code had actually regressed the performance.

With the newer OpenArena 0.8.8 release where we have shaders enabled and other advanced visuals for this otherwise Quake 3 era game, the performance was roughly in line between Ubuntu 13.10 and 15.04, albeit the older releases did have a few frame advantage, but it wouldn't be noticeable to Linux gamers.

The Tesseract open-source game performance shot up with Ubuntu 14.04 but the HD 6870 performance hasn't changed much over the past year.