Mesa 7.11 To Mesa 9.2 R600 Gallium3D Performance

There isn't much change in performance out of the Reaction Quake 3 shooter. This game generally tends to struggle quite a bit on the R600 Gallium3D driver.

Xonotic with low quality settings was running faster on Mesa 9.2 than its earlier releases, but when moving to high and ultra quality visuals, the performance improvement for the HD 4650 has diminished over where Mesa 9.1 is performing.

While there are a few exceptions, overall Mesa 9.2 is much faster than the earlier releases going back to Mesa 7.11. The Radeon HD 4650 is a nice mid-range R700 generation graphics card and so the performance expectations should be similar out of the other older GPUs, but further Phoronix testing from multiple GPUs will happen closer to the Mesa 9.2 release date. For those with older AMD GPUs looking to tweak the performance even more, the R600 SB shader optimizations are worth trying as an easy way to up the OpenGL frame-rates for many Linux games.