The Open-Source ATI Driver Is Becoming A Lot Faster

Urban Terror, like OpenArena, at 800 x 600 is where the open-source drivers continued to lag behind much more. However, even still, there is a 28% increase in frame-rate with the latest code when disabling swap buffer wait compared to Ubuntu Maverick.

At 1400 x 1050 for Urban Terror, it's a 28% boost and puts it at 58% the speed of the Catalyst driver.

While the open-source ATI Radeon driver is not conclusively faster than the Catalyst driver is, it is getting much closer. In some tests on this mobile R500 GPU, the open-source performance is actually faster. However, there is still some work to be done and optimizations to be carried out for these older R500 ASICs and other CPU bottlenecks to address within Gallium3D (look at some of the deltas between the resolutions, other Phoronix articles, etc). This is also with an R500 ASIC where tiling is enabled by default, there is Hyper-Z support, and all-around a more feature-capable driver than what is presently available for the newer generations of Radeon GPUs.

Stay tuned for our complete round-up of R500 ASICs on this newest Mesa 7.11-devel Gallium3D code with the Linux 2.6.38 kernel along with tests from newer hardware as well.