ATI R300: Open v. Closed Drivers

Some of the DriConf options are for adjusting the TCL mode, limiting the rendering latency, vertical synchronization, anisotropic texture filtering, and configuring application-specific settings. For those that enjoy ATI's PowerPlay in the fglrx drivers, enabling DynamicClocks in the xorg.conf when using the open-source drivers will allow for similar benefits. For performance tuning reasons the AccelMethod set in our X configuration was XAA (as opposed to EXA) while both ColorTiling and EnablePageFlip were enabled. The GARTSize was also set for 64MB.

When it came time to install the closed-source ATI fglrx drivers, we had generated the packages using the --buildpkg Ubuntu/eft argument. The aticonfig utility was also used to automatically configure the xorg.conf for usage. Below are the options within the fglrxcontrolpanel as of the 8.29.6 release.

With the benchmarking we once again pulled out Enemy Territory (v2.60) with the Railgun demo while running the game at stock settings with various resolutions. We also used the legacy Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo with the standard benchmarking scripts. The resolution used for Unreal Tournament testing was 800 x 600. Doom 3 and Quake 4 continue to face texture issues with the open-source R300 drivers, which is why we had not included those benchmarks in this article. The Unreal Tournament 2004 frame-rate was also unplayable with the open-source drivers, which is why we had opted against performing those tests.