Phoronix takes a look at the performance of the Gallium3D driver using the AMD A10-6800K with its Radeon HD 8670D graphics

After running earlier this week a 21-way graphics card comparison with Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA GPUs, there were requests by some Phoronix readers to see some new APU performance numbers. For ending out November, here's new Catalyst vs. Gallium3D driver benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux for the AMD A10-6800K with its Radeon HD 8670D graphics. The results with the latest Linux kernel and Mesa are very positive towards the open-source AMD driver where in some tests the performance can nearly match Catalyst! For at least one Source Engine game, the open-source driver can now even run significantly faster than the binary driver.

The quad-core AMD A10-6800K "Richland" APU with Radeon HD 8670D graphics was tested on Ubuntu 13.10 x86_64 in its out-of-the-box configuration (Linux 3.11 + Mesa 9.2), then with the Catalyst driver installed via the fglrx package in the Ubuntu 13.10 archive, and lastly when using the Linux 3.13 kernel in its Git state as of 30 November and also using the Oibaf driver archive for Mesa 10.1-devel and a Git snapshot of the xf86-video-ati DDX.

  AMD APU On Linux: Gallium3D Can Be 80%+ As Fast As Catalyst