AMD Kaveri: Gallium3D vs. Catalyst Drivers

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 19 January 2014 at 05:37 AM EST. Page 3 of 5. 45 Comments.
AMD Kaveri RadeonSI Gallium3D Linux 3D

The open-source Kaveri driver support might be good enough if you're not interested in any 3D gaming, but that's sadly about it. Video acceleration with the open-source driver via the VDPAU state tracker will be tested later on Phoronix.

AMD Kaveri RadeonSI Gallium3D Linux 3D
AMD Kaveri RadeonSI Gallium3D Linux 3D

The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver also loses out to Catalyst with its 2D acceleration performance on GLAMOR being much lower than with the Catalyst code-paths. There are GLAMOR 2D performance improvements coming, but they haven't landed yet and likely won't come for most Kaveri users until they upgrade to newer releases of their distributions in the months ahead.

AMD Kaveri RadeonSI Gallium3D Linux 3D
AMD Kaveri RadeonSI Gallium3D Linux 3D

With these really low performance numbers, testing the Source Engine and other Steam games doesn't make too much sense at this point. However, it was attempted anyway. As mentioned in The Linux 3.13 Kernel Is A Must-Have For AMD RadeonSI Users, Counter-Strike: Source and Team Fortress 2 Source Engine benchmarks were going to be used, but when trying out the OpenBenchmarking.org test profile with its pre-recorded demo, it turns out there's been an update shipped down via Steam that breaks compatibility with the older time demos. Thus they were skipped; read about running benchmarks on other new Linux games.


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