Phoronix sends words that the latest open-source Gallium3D driver is outperforming an older AMD Catalyst driver from 2010 in some Linux OpenGL games

In this article are benchmarks of the past two Ubuntu Long-Term Support releases (Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS and Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS) compared to the latest Ubuntu 13.04 development state. Being looked at specifically for this round of testing is the AMD Radeon Linux graphics performance with the latest open-source driver compared to an older Catalyst driver. For an AMD Radeon HD 4800 series graphics card, the current state of the open-source graphics driver on Linux is beginning to outperform an old AMD Catalyst driver from 2010 for select Linux OpenGL games.

For running some Ubuntu Linux legacy benchmarks for reference, an old AMD Phenom 9500 Quad-Core system was pulled out and an AMD Radeon HD 4830 graphics card installed. The results being shared today are the OpenGL results for Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS, and Ubuntu 13.04 with the latest development version as of this week. There will be other articles in the coming days looking at other areas of the Linux system performance going back several years from this original AMD Phenom system.

  AMD Radeon Gallium3D Starting To Out-Run Catalyst In Some Cases