Radeon Gallium3D Improvements Compared To Legacy Catalyst

The Nexuiz open-source performance is lower than it was one year ago because back then the R600 Gallium3D driver didn't have proper MSAA anti-aliasing support as needed by Nexuiz, so it was better performance at a lower image quality. While MSAA is now present -- and it was during Catalyst testing -- the Radeon HD 4870 with the very latest open-source Linux driver code is now at 60% the speed of the Legacy Catalyst driver.

The lightweight OpenArena 0.8.5 game is running 71% faster than one year ago with Linux 3.12 + Mesa 10.0, but the Catalyst driver was still 33% faster. The open-source driver already has most of the possible optimizations in place for the RV770 GPU and an increasing focus of the open-source driver developers is turning to the RadeonSI driver, so it will be interesting to see if the R600g performance ever reaches true parity to the legacy binary driver.

With the more demanding OpenArena 0.8.8 release, the performance tripled on the open-source driver compared to where it was one year ago with R600g, but the legacy Catalyst blob was still 87% faster!