One of the common complaints about the ATI Catalyst Linux driver is slow 2D performance, but is this really the case? Does AMD's binary-only Linux driver have 2D performance issues that could actually make it run slower than the open-source driver developed by the X.Org community through specifications released by AMD? In this article we have run a total of 28 benchmarks looking squarely at the 2D performance between the Catalyst (fglrx) driver and the xf86-video-ati (Radeon) drivers on Ubuntu Linux.
This testing is quite simple, we took an ATI Radeon X1800XT 256MB graphics card and looked at the 2D performance using the
Catalyst 8.12 / fglrx 8.56.4 driver and then again with the
xf86-video-ati 6.10.0 (obtained from its Git repository along with the latest DRM code as of January 13, 2009). The rest of the hardware consisted of an
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 at 4.00GHz,
ASUS P5E64 WS Professional motherboard, 2GB of OCZ DDR3 memory, 160GB WDC WD1600JS-00MHB0 SATA HDD, and a
Samsung SyncMaster 305T 30-inch LCD at 2560 x 1600. On the software side we were using Ubuntu 8.10 with the Linux 2.6.27 kernel, GNOME 2.24.1, X Server 1.5.2, GCC 4.3.2, and the default EXT3 file-system. For carrying our our tests we used the
Phoronix Test Suite. EXA acceleration was used during testing with the open-source ATI stack.
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While the Catalyst Linux driver is frequently criticized as being slow when it comes to the 2D performance, the Catalyst 8.12 driver with the ATI Radeon X1800XT graphics card had actually better performance than the open-source xf86-video-ati driver in 17 of the 28 tests performed using the Phoronix Test Suite. Though in some of the tests where the open-source ATI stack was faster, the Catalyst Linux driver was substantially slower (by up to five times or more in some of the tests). There are certainly some operations where the Catalyst driver is faster and other areas where it is not being accelerated well at all. The 2D performance of the xf86-video-ati driver should be more competitive with the introduction of
X Server 1.6, which does bring some EXA improvements. On a similar note, just recently the open-source ATI stack began supporting
basic 2D acceleration on the R600/700 series.
