Radeon R600 Gallium3D MSAA Performance Update

It's been a while since last checking out the multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) performance of the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver. However, with the recent release of Mesa 9.2, here are new benchmarks of the MSAA Radeon Gallium3D performance from three different AMD graphics cards on Xubuntu Linux.

Up to now the most recent MSAA Radeon Gallium3D benchmarks on Phoronix were from this past January when a Mesa update made Radeon MSAA much faster, but a lot has changed in the Mesa code since then (plus the evolving Radeon DRM bits on the kernel side too). To see where things are at today I ran some Mesa 9.3.0-devel Git benchmarks of the R600 Gallium3D driver when not using MSAA, 2x MSAA, 4x MSAA, 6x MSAA, and 8x MSAA. Mesa also supports Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA) but that wasn't the subject of today's testing. There's also other advanced forms of anti-aliasing not yet implemented by Mesa / Gallium3D.

The graphics cards used for this round of testing included an ATI Radeon HD 4890, AMD Radeon HD 6450, and AMD Radeon HD 6870 to represent a range of old and new, high and low-end GPUs on the R600 Gallium3D open-source graphics driver. The MSAA level was set using the GALLIUM_MSAA environment variable for all of this Linux OpenGL game benchmarking. The benchmarking was performed in a fully controlled and automated environment using the Phoronix Test Suite.