AMD Fusion Linux Gallium3D Performance Has Improved A Lot

Performance improvements were found with the OpenGL 3.x GpuTest benchmark when enabling dynamic power management (radeon.dpm=1) on Linux 3.11 and turning on the R600 SB back-end (R600_DEBUG=sb), but there's still a way for the performance to improve in competing with the AMD Catalyst graphics driver.

While just an AMD APU was tested in this article, as other Phoronix coverage has shown, new features like Radeon dynamic power management and the R600 SB shader optimization back-end have the ability to benefit a great deal of AMD GPUs. Compared to the stock Ubuntu 13.04 graphics stack, there are many possible performance gains by upgrading to the latest packages (Mesa 9.2/Git and Linux 3.11) and turning on non-default performance settings. While gains were made, the Catalyst driver is still running ahead for the time being.