With
Mesa 7.1 having been released this week and the
open-source R600/770 3D support just
around the corner, we've taken this opportunity to see how the open-source Mesa 3D stack compares to AMD's monthly-refined Catalyst Linux Suite with the fglrx driver performs for the Radeon X1000 (R500) series. In this article are Mesa 7.1 and Catalyst 8.8 benchmarks for the Radeon X1300PRO and X1800XL graphics cards.
Since May, the open-source community has continued working on improving the R500 Mesa and DRM components as well as continuing to work on the
xf86-video-ati and
xf86-video-radeonhd DDX drivers. While this R500 work has been going on, in private AMD has been working on the R600 3D support along with help from Red Hat's David Airlie and the RadeonHD Novell group. The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) component for the R600 GPUs
has been published, but there is no 3D support yet. Though in the coming weeks the first bit of open-source R600 3D support will arrive. For those not up to speed on AMD's open-source support, however, there is already
mode-setting support for the R600 series and even the newer
Radeon HD 4850,
HD 4870, and
HD 4870 X2 graphics cards.
The R500 3D support isn't 100% complete yet, but it's now usable to most Linux desktop users and makes it a great time to begin benchmarking. We had used Catalyst 8.8 (fglrx 8.52) driver for the proprietary testing and on the open-source side we had used the xf86-video-ati, DRM, and Mesa 7.1 code all checked out on August 27, 2008 from their git master branches.
The ATI Radeon X1300PRO 256MB and ATI Radeon X1800XL 256MB graphics cards were used in this driver comparison. We had intended on using a Radeon X1800XT and X1950PRO too, but we had run into problems there.
