ATI R300 Mesa, Gallium3D Compared To Catalyst

“Last quarter we compared the Catalyst and Mesa driver
performance using an ATI Radeon HD 4830 graphics card, compared the
Gallium3D and classic Mesa drivers for ATI Radeon X1000 series
hardware, and ultimately found that even with the ATI R500 class
graphics cards the open-source driver is still playing catch-up to
AMD’s proprietary Catalyst Linux driver. In this article we have
similar tests to show the performance disparity with ATI’s much
older R300 class hardware. Even with Radeon hardware that has had
open-source support much longer, their drivers are not nearly as
mature as an outdated Catalyst driver in the same
configuration.

“With this latest testing we have results from Mesa 7.9-devel
Git code for the classic R300 DRI driver and the Gallium3D “R300g”
driver while running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, results from a clean
installation of Ubuntu 8.10 with its stock Mesa 7.2 classic DRI
driver stack, and finally results from Catalyst 8.10 with Ubuntu
8.10. Ubuntu 8.10 was the last Ubuntu Linux release to support the
R300/400/500 class with the proprietary Catalyst driver since the
support was dropped from their mainline Catalyst driver in early
2009.”

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