AMD R600/700 2D Performance: Open vs. Closed Drivers

“The classic Mesa support for the Radeon HD 2000 through Radeon
HD 4000 series is maturing and is now able to run basic OpenGL
games and applications, while the Gallium3D support is still a ways
out. However, now that there is finally the Catalyst 9.10 driver
within Ubuntu Karmic Koala that supports the latest kernel, we are
finally able to directly compare the performance of AMD’s Catalyst
driver and that of the latest open-source code. In this article we
have benchmarks showing the 2D performance between these two driver
options with both an R600 and R700 graphics card.

“For this round of Linux 2D benchmarks we tested an ATI Radeon
HD 3850 (RV670PRO) and then the ATI Radeon HD 4650 (RV730). We
tested both of these graphics cards on a system running an Ubuntu
9.10 (x86_64) daily LiveCD snapshot with the Linux
2.6.31-10-generic kernel, GNOME 2.28.0, and X Server 1.6.3. The
open-source DDX driver was xf86-video-ati 6.12.99 with the
respective Linux 2.6.31 kernel DRM (using the EXA acceleration
during the testing process) and then the proprietary driver was the
Catalyst 9.10 driver that is currently available through Ubuntu’s
package repository. The rest of the hardware on this test system
included an AMD Sempron 3400+ clocked at 2.16GHz, an ECS A790GXM-A
motherboard, and Seagate 250GB ST3250310AS SATA HDD.”

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