AMD Gallium3D & Catalyst Drivers Compete Against Windows

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 2 August 2013 at 12:57 PM EDT. Page 6 of 6. 66 Comments.
Radeon Windows vs. Ubuntu Catalyst Gallium3D
Radeon Windows vs. Ubuntu Catalyst Gallium3D

For GpuTest's GiMark and TessMark demos, the Radeon Gallium3D driver wouldn't function. However, between Windows and Linux on Catalyst, the results were close but Windows 8 was the numerical winner.

Radeon Windows vs. Ubuntu Catalyst Gallium3D
Radeon Windows vs. Ubuntu Catalyst Gallium3D
Radeon Windows vs. Ubuntu Catalyst Gallium3D

The results were close for Catalyst in the other GpuTests while the AMD Radeon Gallium3D open-source GPU driver lagged behind.

Overall, the Linux Catalyst driver performance ranged from being comparable to lagging behind the Catalyst Windows 8 driver. There's also near feature parity between the Windows and Linux drivers. However, the results weren't as competitive and favorite as the NVIDIA binary Linux graphics driver testing. When it came to the Radeon Gallium3D testing, there was generally a distant lead for the Catalyst driver but overall its OpenGL performance is getting into decent shape given the conditions and other shortcomings. That's for the performance of the R600 Gallium3D driver but for the "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver to support the Radeon HD 7000/8000 series graphics cards there's a much larger performance disparity -- new results there are coming soon.

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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.