AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D Is Improving, But Catalyst Is Much Better

Kicking things off with Doom 3, the Ubuntu 13.10 "out of the box" performance with RadeonSI on Mesa 9.2.1 was a fraction of the speed of the Catalyst 13.11 Beta 6 driver. The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's performance was boosted by Mesa 10.0-devel Git, but the Linux 3.12 kernel and enabling Radeon Dynamic Power Management hadn't helped improve the situation for the Radeon R9 270X.

After the OpenArena 0.8.5 performance dropped with the upgrade to Mesa 10, the performance jumped ahead when moving to the Linux 3.12 kernel and enabling DPM. The RadeonSI performance for the R9 270X graphics card was at a high point with Mesa 10.0 and Linux 3.12 DPM, but it still was less than half the speed of the Catalyst driver.

The Catalyst 13.11 Beta 6 driver with the Radeon R9 270X graphics card is four times faster than the open-source driver as of Linux 3.12 + Mesa 10.0.