[ Thanks to Michael Larabel for
this link. ]
“We are in the process of conducting a set of tests
looking at how the performance of Ubuntu Linux has evolved through
their Long-Term Support (LTS) releases beginning with their first
6.06 “Dapper Drake” version followed by Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron”,
and then the Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” release that will be
released by month’s end. These benchmarks will look at how the
performance of Ubuntu Linux has changed over the past four years,
but first we deviated from our original plans to get a look at how
the current open-source ATI R500 graphics driver in Ubuntu 10.04
provided by the Mesa stack performs against older proprietary ATI
Catalyst drivers.“Just last month we delivered benchmarks comparing the Catalyst
vs. Mesa performance with Ubuntu 10.04 using the latest open-source
and closed-source drivers available for the ATI Radeon HD 4850
graphics hardware. This is similar to tests we have carried out in
the past comparing two different drivers from the same point of
time. What we really have not done up to this point is to see how
the current open-source ATI graphics driver compares to a
proprietary Catalyst driver for the past. This has not been done
before, as there really is not a straightforward and reliable way
to carry out such a comparison.“Older ATI Catalyst drivers will not work on newer Linux
distributions due to the proprietary driver not supporting a more
recent Linux kernel or X Server version. Changing around the
open-source graphics driver version often means swapping out Mesa,
the X.Org DDX driver, the Linux kernel for the respective DRM
driver code, a compatible libdrm, and the open-source 2D EXA
performance can also be affected by the X Server version. Further
complicating matters is the fact that AMD routinely drops support
for older GPU generations from the ATI Catalyst like they had done
with the R200 support some time ago and then last year wiped out
the R300/400/500 support from their driver, which limits the number
of drivers and hardware selection that can be tested.”