AMD Kaveri: Gallium3D vs. Catalyst Drivers

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

Well, these results speak for themself: the AMD A10-7850K "Kaveri" APU performs quite miserably on the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver in the current latest configuration of the Linux 3.13 kernel with the Mesa 10.1-devel "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver using the default configuration. For all of these OpenGL tests the closed-source AMD Catalyst driver was multiple times faster.

Besides the OpenGL performance being heavily in favor of Catalyst, the closed-source driver also has the advantages on this latest APU of having better OpenGL support (GL 3.1 vs. GL 4.3), much better OpenCL support that works "out of the box", and faster 2D performance, among other benefits. Unless you are an open-source GPU driver developer or just really committed to using open-source graphics drivers and only need basic acceleration on the Linux desktop, it's not worth using the open-source AMD Linux GPU driver with Kaveri for several (or what could be many) months until all of these issues are resolved. The open-source AMD Linux graphics driver is really a minefield at times; heck, just yesterday I was real excited over the latest Radeon DRM performance improvements for some high-end discrete GCN GPUs on Linux 3.13.

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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.