Phoronix takes a look at the drive performance of AMD Catalyst vs. Open-Source Gallium3D

In this article is a large OpenGL performance comparison looking at the frame-rates in different Linux games for different AMD Radeon Linux graphics cards when running the stock Ubuntu 12.10 operating system (Mesa 9.0 + Linux 3.5), the Catalyst Linux driver (fglrx 9.0.2) as found in the Ubuntu Quantal archive, and then when running the very latest Radeon Git code: The Linux 3.7 kernel, Mesa 9.1-devel, and xf86-video-ati 7.0.99 Git.

The graphics cards used in this testing roundabout were all from the Radeon HD 5000 and Radeon HD 6000 series. The latest Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards still don't have adequate open-source support while the Radeon HD 4000 series and older graphics cards are no longer supported by the mainline AMD Catalyst binary driver. In a future article will be results looking solely at the open-source AMD Radeon Linux performance across the different generations that will not be using Catalyst and thus will go back further with the results.

  AMD Catalyst vs. Open-Source Gallium3D Driver Performance