ATI R500 Linux Performance

Well, what can we say? The ATI R500 performance has certainly improved. In all of the benchmarks with all of the graphics cards, the 8.41 driver was considerably faster. On average, this new driver allowed these ATI graphics cards to operate between 50% and 90% faster. These driver improvements surely fill the gap between NVIDIA and ATI on Linux and you can find much more about this in our future Phoronix articles. This new Linux driver allows the Radeon X1300PRO to function quite well as a low-end graphics card, and the Radeon X1800XT is now able to shine over the X1800XL, which before these two graphics cards had performed nearly the same as with the Radeon X1950PRO. While the bugs we ran into with the R500 series and the 8.41 driver were minimal, the fglrx 8.42 release will contain additional enhancements for this generation of GPUs.

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