Radeon 3D Performance: Gallium3D vs. Classic Mesa

The OpenArena results are close to the Tremulous results, but at 1920 x 1080 and 2560 x 1600 the Gallium3D driver actually pulls out in front of the classic R300 driver! The delta at 2560 x 1600 was almost ten frames per second greater, which at these low frame-rates actually makes a noticeable difference in the ability to play the game. Another interesting item worth noting is the huge performance delta between 800 x 600 and 1024 x 768 with the classic Mesa driver. There's a huge performance drop not encountered in the other tests and the performance should not degrade that noticeably between those two resolutions.

Lastly, with Urban Terror, the Mesa 7.9 Radeon Gallium3D performance was again flat-lined between 800 x 600 and 2560 x 1600 while the classic Mesa driver was running several times faster except for at 2560 x 1600 when the performance was close between these two open-source drivers. One of Corbin Simpson's theories about the Gallium3D performance not largely being affected between the different resolutions is that the GPU is running fast, but too many kernel calls are being made and it cannot feed the GPU enough information to keep it tasked with rendering.

While the Gallium3D R300 driver is not running faster than the classic Mesa driver is overall, it is performing a bit better and more reliably than we expected. With the games tested in this article on the Radeon X1950PRO, we ran into no stability issues, rendering artifacts, or other issues. In fact, to those enthusiasts there really are no major hurdles now from trying out the Gallium3D driver if using a Radeon X1000 series graphics card or earlier. The performance though of this driver will certainly be getting better once it has been optimized along with the common Gallium3D code and state trackers in general. We will certainly be back with more benchmarks as the Gallium3D hardware support matures. We are also conducting new benchmarks based upon the most recent Git commits over the weekend to see how the performance has evolved in just the past few days since testing. The frame-rates should be even better, particularly for OpenArena, we are told.