AMD Gallium3D Shader Optimizations Yield Big Gains

Reaction Quake 3 is one of the few ioquake3 games where the R600 SB shader optimization back-end has an impact on the overall frame-rates. While the game was already delivering playable frame-rates for the mid-range and high-end Radeon GPUs, the frame-rates were now much better. Additionally, the Radeon HD 6450 and HD 6570 graphics cards went from sub-30 FPS averages to now above 30. GPUs like the Radeon HD 5830 saw their frame-rates rise by over 40%. The only GPU not affected much by the R600 SB back-end in this game was the Cayman-based Radeon HD 6950.

The average frame times are also obviously much improved with the R600 SB back-end.

The Unvanquished open-source game built atop the Daemon engine saw performance improvements too by setting R600_DEBUG=sb though the performance improvements weren't as dramatic and just in the range 10~20%, although every frame counts, especially with the performance-challenged open-source drivers.