AMD Dropping R300-R500 Support In Catalyst Driver
The open-source ATI driver remained in front when it came to 128x128px transformed blit bilinear operations. The xf86-video-ati driver on the ATI Radeon X1950PRO 256MB was able to carry out 4,427 operations per second, but just 4,160 operations per second with the "binary blob" from AMD.
In our final X Render test, the Catalyst driver managed to position itself ahead of the xf86-video-ati driver. When it came to radial gradient painting, the Catalyst driver had 289 operations per second compared to the open-source X.Org driver having 274 operations per second.