"The open-source ATI R300/400 3D support was extended from the R200 3D code, which was written using some documents provided by ATI several years back under NDAs. Much of the R300/400 work was reverse-engineered along the way, but earlier this year AMD had for the first time publicly released the R300 3D register guide. What is clear from these results though that there haven't been any significant performance gains made in the past year and a half at least when it comes to the Radeon X800XL (R430) we tested with our select tests. If any gains were made, they were trounced out by other performance regressions.
"To isolate any regressions caused by other system package updates, we could have built each Mesa release from source on one Ubuntu release, but with this article we were tasked to look at what the end-user would experience across the recent Ubuntu releases. From Ubuntu 7.04 to Ubuntu 7.10 (with the change from Mesa 6.5 to 7.0) there was the biggest performance improvement, but with Ubuntu 8.04 there was a performance drop and another drop occurred with Ubuntu 8.10 except for the x11perf test."
