Radeon R600 Gallium3D MSAA Performance Update

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 12 September 2013 at 02:21 AM EDT. Page 2 of 3. 24 Comments.

When starting with the aging OpenArena game we immediately see that any level of MSAA anti-aliasing causes a very noticeable performance impact on performance for the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver across all three tested GPUs. When MSAA was enabled to 2x, there was a noticeable hit but there wasn't any greater burden at 4x MSAA. When turning to 6x MSAA, there was an additional performance drop, which was of similar equivalence to 8x MSAA.

The newer OpenArena 0.8.8 game also saw the biggest hit going from no MSAA to 2x MSAA, though compared to OpenArena 0.8.5 it did see lower performance in changing from 2x to 4x MSAA. Using 8x MSAA on the Radeon HD 4890 graphics card saw its frame-rate drop by more than half compared to not utilizing any form of anti-aliasing.

The World of Padman experience was similar to OpenArena 0.8.5, with the exception of the HD 6870. MSAA didn't seem to initialize properly for the Radeon HD 6870 graphics card during testing with Padman for whatever reason.


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