Gallium3D Continues Improving OpenGL For Older Radeon GPUs

With the Lightsmark OpenGL lighting benchmark, the performance with the current Mesa Git development code for the Radeon HD 4870 is 38.5% faster than where it was two summers ago. Compared to the current Mesa 9.1 stable release from February, the current Mesa 9.2 development code -- which will officially be released around September of this year -- is 6% faster for old R700 generation graphics processor.

The ride for Nexuiz is a bit bumpier between Mesa releases. Between Mesa 7.11.2 and 9.2-devel there is no major change in performance, but the OpenGL capabilities of the R600 Gallium3D driver has advanced in step with supporting MSAA and other capabilities. Between Mesa 9.1.2 stable and the current development code, the OpenGL frame-rate is up about 5%.

The best OpenArena 0.8.5 graphics performance on the Radeon Gallium3D driver was actually with Mesa 7.11.2, and while it regressed hugely with Mesa 8.0, the performance has been recovering. Between Mesa 9.1.2 and 9.2 Git, the frame-rate is currently up about 15%.

The OpenArena 0.8.8 performance has also been mixed, but with Mesa 9.2-devel the performance is at its best and has recovered from a drop-off in performance experienced during Mesa 9.0 development.