R300 Gallium3D Performance Is Topping Out

There's still a regression in the xf86-video-ati DDX or DRM component for Radeon when it comes to not honoring v-sync, as mentioned in other Phoronix articles recently. With recent Git code, even when vblank_mode=0 is set by the Phoronix Test Suite and swap buffers wait is disabled, for select OpenGL games/applications on the Radeon driver its performance is being capped to 30/60 FPS. Thus the Doom 3 results here are of no real use.

The OpenArena performance has improved with time, except the best frame-rates on the R300 Gallium3D driver weren't in Git master but rather Mesa 7.9.2/7.10.3. Since Mesa 7.11, the performance has dropped for the Radeon X1950PRO graphics card.

For the newer OpenArena 0.8.8 release, the R300g performance peaked at Mesa 7.9.2 while since then has been rather flat. The visual quality was the same throughout the tested Mesa releases.

The Warsow game appears to have been faster on the classic R300 DRI driver.