AMD Fusion Linux Gallium3D Performance Has Improved A Lot

The performance of the open-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver for AMD Fusion APUs has improved a lot, but the Gallium3D driver performance still isn't yet on par with the AMD Catalyst binary driver. In this article are a variety of tests from an AMD APU including with the Linux 3.11 dynamic power management support, Mesa Git, and when using the R600 SB shader optimization back-end.

The testing in this article is from an AMD E-350 "Brazos" with 1.6GHz dual core processor and 492MHz Radeon HD 6310 graphics processor. This AMD Brazos APU testing happened when performing a clean installation of Ubuntu 13.04 and using its stock kernel and graphics stack (Linux 3.8 + Mesa 9.1.3), Ubuntu 13.04 with the shipped fglrx-updates Catalyst driver of fglrx 9.1.11 / OpenGL 4.2.12002, upgrading to just the Linux 3.11 kernel, upgrading to the Linux 3.11 kernel and enabling dynamic power management, sticking with the Linux 3.11 DPM-enabled kernel and then pulling in Mesa 9.3.0-devel git-9375c16 Git, and lastly using this updated DPM kernel + Mesa Git and enabling the R600 SB shader optimization back-end.

The R600 SB shader optimization back-end is very good for boosting the performance as well as the fantastic improvements with the Radeon DPM power management. Overall, this should make for very interesting tests from the AMD E-350 system running Ubuntu 13.04 Linux. All benchmarking happened via the Phoronix Test Suite software.