AMD Kabini HD 8210: RadeonSI Gallium3D Can Outperform Catalyst

The Furmark performance now met Catalyst when upgrading to the Linux 3.14 kernel. In these situations of hitting performance parity, there didn't appear to be any visual rendering issues (or differences) with either driver.

The open-source AMD driver still comes up short with the GpuTest Triangle benchmark, but improved with Linux 3.14. The Linux 3.14 kernel performance boost is likely due to proper re-clocking by default for the Kabini APU with Radeon DPM.

Overall, these results are very exciting and we will have out some new Mesa 10.2-devel + Linux 3.14 RadeonSI benchmarks of other AMD Radeon graphics hardware in the coming days on Phoronix. Before getting too excited thinking all hardware supported by RadeonSI is as fast (or faster) than Catalyst, it's important to keep in mind the AMD Kabini APU has a very low-end graphics processor... It's generally with the lower-end GPUs where we have found the better performance out of the open-source drivers relative to the binary blobs. With higher-end GPUs that are more complex and expose greater functionality, their performance tends to do proportionally worse than the lower-end graphics processors.