DRI2 vs. DRI3 Radeon Linux OpenGL Performance

Under the synthetic OpenGL tests with GpuTest, there was no difference with the Radeon R9 290 or HD 6870 when comparing the DRI2 and DRI3 rendering modes.

For Xonotic and OpenArena, enabling Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 yielded much greater frame-rates than the DRI2 default. DRI3 performance gains are most apparent in CPU-bound workloads. Assuming you're running X.Org Server 1.17+ and other up-to-date open-source driver components, it's as easy as setting Option "DRI3" "1" if you wish to play around with the Radeon DRI3 support. Comment in our forums if you run into any issues or see the earlier article if you're still getting familiarized with DRI3.