" AMD continues to release documentation and code while
the X.Org development community has been hard at work on the
xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd drivers along with Mesa and
Gallium3D components. The main problem though is the open-source
stack -- at this time -- providing poor gaming performance, but
power management can also be a problem. In yesterday's article we
provided some R500 comparative 2D and OpenGL benchmarks, but in
this article are some power management results comparing the
Catalyst 9.2 driver to the xf86-video-ati driver.
"For this testing we used a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 notebook with an
Intel Core Duo T2400 processor, an Intel 945GM Chipset, 80GB
HTS541080G9SA00 SATA HDD, 1GB of system memory, 1400 x 1050
display, and for its graphics is an ATI Radeon Mobility X1400 with
128MB of video memory. The Linux operating system we used was
Ubuntu 8.10 with the Linux 2.6.27 kernel, X Server 1.5.2,
xf86-video-ati 6.9.0, Mesa 7.2, GCC 4.3.2, and the EXT3
file-system. We had compared the performance using the stock
open-source ATI packages to Catalyst 9.2."