AMD Kaveri: Gallium3D vs. Catalyst Drivers

When using the very latest open-source graphics code in mainline (Linux 3.13 + Mesa 10.1-devel Git), the Catalyst driver was still multiple times faster. For the aging Doom 3 game the Catalyst driver was more than seven times faster than this latest open-source driver -- with this driver already being much better than what's found "out of the box" in Ubuntu 13.10 where there was no 2D/3D hardware acceleration.

The open-source driver also loses out as the Catalyst binary blob exposed OpenGL 4.3 support where was the RadeonSI driver was advertising OpenGL 3.1.

The Catalyst driver also has the advantage over RadeonSI of proper OpenCL GPGPU support where as the OpenCL support in the open-source driver is still rather primitive, not shipped/enabled by default in most (all?) Linux distributions out there, and only works with a small subset of real OpenCL programs.

It will likely be some months before the open-source AMD Kaveri Linux graphics support is in good standing.