Intel/NVIDIA/AMD Compete On Open/Closed Source Linux GPU Driver Performance

Xonotic with its image quality settings ramped up still saw good performance out of the Radeon HD 5000/6000 series graphics cards on the Gallium3D driver when compared to the current AMD Catalyst 13.6 Beta Linux driver performance. However, the Radeon HD 7000 series hardware is still slower -- in part due to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver still being raised (it only supports OpenGL 2.1 still) and also with the dynamic re-clocking support to be merged into the Radeon DRM for the Linux 3.11 kernel.

On the open-source NVIDIA side, its performance also remains largely uncompetitive with the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver since for the modern GPUs it's still unable to re-clock the GPU and video memory.

The open-source Intel Linux graphics performance with the HD Graphics 4600 on the Core i7 4770K "Haswell" was running just faster than the Radeon HD 6450 graphics card with the Catalyst driver.

A greater open vs. closed-source Linux graphics card comparison will come once Mesa 9.2 has been officially released and likewise once the Linux 3.11 kernel is in a released form.