Gallium3D Continues Improving OpenGL For Older Radeon GPUs
The Xonotic game with low-quality settings didn't evolve too much across the past five Mesa development cycles.
Running Xonotic with high quality settings was more exciting. After seeing a nearly 10% jump in performance out of Mesa 9.0, the performance for Mesa 9.2 is currently up about another 3%.
It's nice to see that the Radeon HD 4870 "RV770" performance continues to improve for the Mesa/Gallium3D open-source Linux driver. This five-year-old graphics card continues to be improved for the open-source driver at a time when AMD abandoned the support already from the Catalyst driver and many of the open-source graphics driver developers are focusing most of their attention on the more recent Radeon HD 5000/6000/7000 series of graphics hardware.
While there are performance improvements, these OpenGL results are still likely a ways below the performance levels of the AMD Catalyst driver supporting the HD 4000 series. (Tests to confirm this belief may come in a later article when installing an older Linux distribution where the AMD Catalyst driver is supported in this configuration.) There's also other shortcomings of this open-source driver with the RV770 hardware supporting OpenGL 3.3 but there only being OpenGL 3.1~3.2 support at present in the R600g software, UVD video decoding support didn't come until last month, there's still a lot left to be desired with power management, there is no form of open-source CrossFire support, and other more advanced features of the Catalyst driver are currently non-existent in the open-source world (more advanced AA modes, etc).
For more perspective on this matter, be sure to see the recent 15-Way Open vs. Closed Source NVIDIA/AMD Linux GPU Comparison.
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