The Rate of ATI Gallium3D Changes Is Impressive

Last week prior to heading over to Germany for LinuxTag, I had ran a new set of ATI R500 Gallium3D benchmarks with an ATI Radeon X1950PRO graphics card and comparing the latest Mesa/Gallium3D graphics driver performance in the Mesa 7.9-devel Git code with both the Gallium3D and classic Mesa DRI drivers to the older Mesa stack found in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. The ATI "R300g" driver as its known continues to advance, and over the past week this driver has pushed forward even more. Here is another set of ATI Gallium3D tests.

Over the past week and a half there has been a number of code commits targeting the R300g driver. Much of this R300g work continues to be done by Marek Olšák and Corbin Simpson. These commit changes range from fixing bugs to more MSAA (multi-sampling anti-aliasing) setup, introducing an API for building command buffers, rewritten occlusion queries, fallbacks for a few functions, addressing a memory leak, and various other issues addressed. In total there has been about 50 commits specific to this ATI Gallium3D driver for ATI R300/400/500 ASICs over the past ten days.

With the occlusion queries rewrite, Marek even said in his Git commit message, "This fixes flickering in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. The driver now renders everything correctly in this game and the graphics is awesome." With the newest Phoronix testing of the R300g driver with the Git code as of the morning of 2010-06-17, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars does successfully start-up and most of the game's menu system works fine except for the background and the text drop shadows. However, when attempting to start any time-demo or try to get into the gameplay, the ET:QW demo would produce a segmentation fault.

This most recent testing is an extension of our results done on the same system as the Gallium3D tests from earlier this month. Again, this system was based around an Intel Core i3 530 processor clocked at 3.32GHz, an ECS H55H-M motherboard, 2GB of DDR3 system memory, a 64GB OCZ Vertex SSD, and an ATI Radeon X1950PRO (RV570) graphics card. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was the basis of this system and with our new tests (labeled "Mid-June Gallium3D" in the test results) was the Gallium v0.4 R300g driver as found in the Mesa 7.9-devel code on Git as of 2010-06-17.