Radeon Open-Source Performance Over Three Years, Compared To Legacy Catalyst

Catalyst was tested back in its late 2011 state prior to the support being dropped in early 2012 and the latest Catalyst legacy driver no longer being compatible with new Linux distribution releases. All Ubuntu Linux installations were done using clean installs and left in their stock package configurations. The only driver change made to each stack was disabling swap buffers wait.

All benchmarking was handled via the Phoronix Test Suite. The same hardware was used throughout testing and it was a Radeon HD 4870 512MB PCI Express graphics card installed on an AMD Opteron 2384 system with Tyan S2927 motherboard. These results should provide a nice look at how the open-source Radeon performance has evolved over the past three years even for legacy hardware and whether the recent Radeon R600 Gallium3D improvements are enough to bump it past Catalyst Legacy for this RV770 graphics card.