Power Management: ATI Catalyst vs. Open-Source ATI Driver

Mar 07, 2009, 03:03 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Michael Larabel)

[ Thanks to Michael Larabel for this link. ]

" 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."

Complete Story

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