Mesa 7.11 To Mesa 9.2 R600 Gallium3D Performance

For those with older generations of AMD/ATI Radeon graphics processors that may not be running the very latest Mesa Gallium3D driver release, here are benchmarks comparing every major Mesa release between Mesa 7.11 and Mesa 9.2.

With Mesa 9.2 due to be branched soon ahead of its release next month, it's time to run some comparative benchmarks spanning the course of several major Mesa releases. In this article, the Git branches of 7.11/8.0/9.0/9.1/master (9.2) were tested on the R600 Gallium3D driver. Other hardware/driver tests will come in future Phoronix articles.

An ATI Radeon HD 4650 graphics card was benchmarked on an Intel Core i7 3960X Sandy Bridge EE system running Ubuntu 13.10 with the Linux 3.10 kernel. The Radeon HD 4000 series is no longer supported by the mainline Catalyst driver so for newer Linux distributions using the open-source Radeon Linux GPU driver with R600 Gallium3D is the only option.

For this testing the ATI DDX had SwapBuffersWait disabled, Mesa was built with texture-float support, and all other changes were maintained the same across testing. The Mesa versions tested were 7.11.2, 8.0.5, 9.0.3, 9.1.4, and 9.2.0-devel git-1415a18. All benchmarking was handled in a fully automated and reproducible way using the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.