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

The GpuTest OpenGL 3 benchmarks were comparatively slower on the open-source Radeon Linux driver compared to Catalyst, but the performance is much better than we've seen out of earlier revisions of the Radeon DRM in the Linux kernel and Radeon Gallium3D.

Overall, the modern Radeon open-source Linux graphics driver is moving in the right direction. The performance is becoming more competitive with the Catalyst driver while other items we're still waiting on is a suitable OpenCL implementation for Linux desktop users, OpenGL 3.2/3.3 and OpenGL 4.x functionality, and various Radeon-specific hardware features. For more details on the current limitations and advantages of the drivers, check out the many other Phoronix articles on the topic.

Another tweak to further push the open-source Radeon driver performance is enabling the R600 SB shader optimization back-end, which wasn't covered in this article but can easily be enabled as tested in other Phoronix articles.