"This testing is quite simple, we took an ATI Radeon X1800XT 256MB graphics card and looked at the 2D performance using the Catalyst 8.12 / fglrx 8.56.4 driver and then again with the xf86-video-ati 6.10.0 (obtained from its Git repository along with the latest DRM code as of January 13, 2009). The rest of the hardware consisted of an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 at 4.00GHz, ASUS P5E64 WS Professional motherboard, 2GB of OCZ DDR3 memory, 160GB WDC WD1600JS-00MHB0 SATA HDD, and a Samsung SyncMaster 305T 30-inch LCD at 2560 x 1600. On the software side we were using Ubuntu 8.10 with the Linux 2.6.27 kernel, GNOME 2.24.1, X Server 1.5.2, GCC 4.3.2, and the default EXT3 file-system. For carrying our our tests we used the Phoronix Test Suite. EXA acceleration was used during testing with the open-source ATI stack."
