AMD R600 Gallium3D Performance Changes Found On Mesa 9.3
Lastly with GpuTest, the performance for Furmark improved by 55% for the R600 Gallium3D driver on the AMD HD 4870 GPU while the other GpuTest workloads were the same when compared to Mesa 9.2.1 stable.
Overall, for the lighter-weight OpenGL games/workloads, Mesa 9.3 Git (what should be known as Mesa 10.0) tended to run about the same speed as Mesa 9.2.1 or otherwise regress by 20~30+%. Meanwhile for the more demanding open-source cases like Furmark and Xonotic with ultra quality settings, there was a performance boost. Again, as the final Mesa 9.3/10.0 release approaches we will be back with plenty more benchmarks -- including of different/multiple Radeon graphics cards and a more diverse spectrum of tests to see how the Linux OpenGL performance is looking. Besides performance differences, there's also new OpenGL 3/4 support in Mesa and other driver functionality differences to be covered.
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