AMD Radeon Gallium3D Catches Up To Catalyst For Some Linux Games

When running Unigine Tropics the HD 5830 Gallium3D was 85% the speed of Catalyst, the HD 6870 was 84% the speed of Catalyst, and the HD 6950 was about 65% the speed of Catalyst when using the latest open-source Linux graphics code.

Xonotic with low image quality settings yielded results under the open-source driver that were getting close to the Catalyst driver. In the past few months the performance is up further for these several year old graphics cards thanks to Mesa 10 and the Linux 3.13 kernel improvements.

With higher image quality settings in Xonotic there's still a ways to go before the performance will match Catalyst, but at least the Mesa and Radeon DRM improvements are moving the performance in the right direction.