RadeonSI Color Tiling Brings OpenGL Performance Boost

The performance gains out of color tiling with Xonotic on high quality settings was much more apparent than Xonotic with the low quality visuals.

The GpuTest workloads benefited from enabling of color tiling but their performance was still off by a long ways from the Catalyst driver.

As with the R600 Gallium3D driver tests from last year, color tiling is a big OpenGL performance win for the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. Initial support for 2D color tiling is found in Mesa 9.2 and upcoming releases of the xf86-video-ati DDX should enable it by default while until then you can use the color tiling options in the xorg.conf for manually forcing the setting.

Stay tuned for next week for a larger RadeonSI open-source vs. closed-source Linux GPU driver comparison with a few other Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards on Ubuntu.