The Most Comprehensive AMD Radeon Linux Graphics Comparison

Finally, with Nexuiz we have a decent look at both Radeon Linux drivers.

To no surprise, the open-source Radeon driver performs well behind the proprietary Catalyst driver for all generations of hardware. The area where the open-source driver performance is closest to the Catalyst driver is on the lowest-end GPUs in each series, but with the more powerful GPUs they simply are not fully utilized by Gallium3D and the Radeon DRM driver. The missing points in the graph are due to the aforementioned driver issues for select hardware.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite we can easily condense all of this performance data into something more manageable. If averaging out all of the data for the Catalyst and Gallium3D drivers from Nexuiz, we see that the proprietary Catalyst driver is about 2.65x faster.