AMD Fusion On Gallium3D Leaves A Lot To Be Desired

Yep, same for Warsow too... The power efficiency of Catalyst was 2.63x better on the A8-3870K system as measured by the USB-based power meter and auto-polled by the Phoronix Test Suite.

Hopefully AMD's upcoming Fusion "Trinity" APUs will improve the picture for the open-source Radeon Linux driver stack, but at this point it doesn't look that way until further open-source driver power management improvements are made. The Catalyst binary driver handily beats the Radeon Gallium3D driver when it comes to overall performance and its power efficiency on Ubuntu 12.04. How does this compare to Intel's hardware in terms of performance and power efficiency with their open-source Intel Linux driver? Those numbers are forthcoming and will be quite surprising.