Radeon Gallium3D Moved Closer To Performance Parity With AMD's Catalyst In 2014
First up is our usual most basic test: OpenArena. It's been around for years and has long worked with both the open and closed-source drivers so it serves as a nice reference sample for those wishing to compare any numbers to past articles, etc.
With the Radeon HD 6450 and HD 6870, the Catalyst driver was just 11~15% faster than the latest open-source driver. With the GCN GPUs (HD 7850/R9 270X/R9 290) the performance of Catalyst was 27~31% faster. Performing the worst in comparison was the Radeon HD 6950 with the Catalyst driver being nearly twice as fast. The poor HD 6950 open-source performance has always been this way with the Cayman GPU architecture not being well optimized on the R600g driver.
No major surprises when looking at the frame latencies on a modified box plot graph...
On the R600g driver with the HD 6450/6870 the Catalyst gain was only 5~8% faster. With the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver with the modern GCN GPUs, Catalyst was still delivering frame-rates 40~51% faster for the tested hardware.