The Rate of ATI Gallium3D Changes Is Impressive

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 18 June 2010 at 08:35 AM EDT. Page 3 of 3. 14 Comments.

Tremulous also sped up a bit with the frame-rate increasing by a couple frames per second (i.e. 27 to 30 and 26 to 29) in recent days, which is rather significant considering the already low frame-rate for this game on the high-end R500 graphics processor. However, the performance of Tremulous with the ATI R300/400/500 Gallium3D driver continues to struggle horribly in comparison to the respective classic Mesa driver that is about four times faster.

Urban Terror is also faster by 3~6% in this newest code.

The Smokin Guns game didn't improve as much over the past two weeks as did some of the other games, but its numbers were 2~3% faster with the newest open-source Mesa code.

The ATI "R300g" Gallium3D driver is certainly maturing nicely and is amazing to see it almost capable of running Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. We certainly will be back with more benchmarks especially as this Gallium3D hardware driver may replace the classic R300/400/500 DRI driver in the upcoming Mesa 7.9 release. Sadly, the "R600g" Gallium3D driver for ATI R600/700 (Radeon HD 2000, 3000, 4000 series) hardware is not progressing as fast as it has still not fully hit the glxgears milestone yet, but at least this code is now living in Mesa master.

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