The Other Issue With Ubuntu 11.10: Boot Speed

While the Radeon HD 4870 may be burning through more power while under load, at least the open-source Gallium3D "R600g" driver is much faster under Oneiric. The performance for Lightsmark and Nexuiz has more than doubled with this latest release, thanks to the latest Linux 3.0 DRM and notable improvements in Mesa 7.11 to the Gallium3D driver.

There is a regression though with the Ubuntu 11.10 frame-rates dropping noticeably for the Qfusion-powered Warsow game. Ubuntu 10.10 would not run Warsow v0.61.