The Open-Source Linux Graphics Card Showdown

When running the Lightsmark OpenGL lighting benchmark at 1920 x 1080, the i7-3770K on the Mesa 8.1-devel DRI driver with Linux 3.4 kernel was running just under 60 FPS. The discrete Radeon graphics cards with Gallium3D (R600g) that produced superior results were the Radeon HD 5750, HD 6570, and HD 6770. The Radeon HD 6770 on open-source was about 45% faster while the Radeon HD 6570 was just about 6% faster.

While the HD 4000 graphics lost out in raw performance for Lightsmark to several graphics cards, it did beat out the eight NVIDIA/AMD GPUs on their open-source driver when it came to performance-per-Watt. The i7-3770K graphics delivered 19% better performance-per-Watt than the HD 6770 (the graphics card producing the fastest Lightsmark numbers) while it was 9% better than the Radeon HD 6570 (the most power-efficient Radeon GPU for this Linux benchmark).