AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series Open-Source Driver Becomes More Competitive

Kicking off things with the least demanding test was OpenArena 0.8.5, but here the R600 Gallium3D + Linux 3.11 DRM with DPM yielded competitive results. All of the tested GPU graphics cards were above 60 FPS except for the Radeon HD 6570 graphics card. All of the tested graphics cards had open-source Radeon Gallium3D performance that was 60~80% the speed of Catalyst with the exception of the Radeon HD 6570 GPU. With OpenArena and the other tested GPUs, the Radeon HD 6570 GPU seems to have some serious issues with the latest open-source Linux driver. Dynamic power management might not be properly working with this hardware or some other issue as its results were disproportionally worse than all other HD 6000 GPUs when tested on the same system and software.

With the newer OpenArena game, the results for the open-source Radeon Linux driver were also in good shape against Catalyst except for the continued problematic HD 6570. The high-end Radeon HD 6950 "Cayman" GPU was also not performing quite as good as the other "Northern Islands" GPUs but at least much better than the HD 6570.