AMD's Catalyst Evolution For The Radeon HD 7000 Series

When starting with Doom 3 and running it at 2560 x 1600 with ultra quality settings, there is not anything to get too excited about. Catalyst 12.1 began things for the Radeon HD 7960 on Linux by running the game at 220 FPS while with the now-public Catalyst 12.6 driver (beta) it is at 221 FPS. With the yet-to-be-publicly-released fglrx 9.0.0 AMD press driver beta, the frame-rate is at 231 FPS. However, regardless of changes here, the id Tech 4 Doom 3 game really isn't stressing modern graphics hardware at all when using the proprietary graphics drivers -- only on the open-source Mesa/Gallium3D drivers is it any interesting.

The Lightsmark results for a high-end AMD Radeon graphics card on the Catalyst driver is also largely uninteresting due to the extremely high frame-rates, but here we see some fluctuation between driver releases in terms of the average frame-rate. However, overall there is no definitive --upward or downward -- trend in the Catalyst Linux driver for this OpenGL lighting benchmark over the past half-year.

OpenArena 0.8.8 also is not too stressful on the Catalyst driver with a Radeon HD 7950, but here there seems to be a slight downward trend to the OpenGL performance for this cross-platform open-source game.