after there was a major performance regression with the introduction of kernel mode setting(KMS) for the radeon driver, it looks like the change starts to pay off now. You can already find on the fly display reconfiguration and dynamic power management with the upcoming kernel 2.6.34.
But if you enable the Gallium3D based r300g driver 3D performance takes off too – and makes you forget fglrx. While the Gallium3D based driver only had OpenGL2 to offer but had a horrible performance, it now easily overtakes the performance the classical r300 driver had with user mode setting.(UMS)
The last major boost came along with ColorTiling support which greatly improves the memory access, here a fast glxgears benchmark:
- 10208 frames in 5s (no kms + classic mesa)
- 9200 frames in 5s (kms + classic mesa)
- 13400 frames in 5s (kms + gallium driver)
although this gives you a clue, the performance gain is much bigger in something that actually uses textures – like openarena.
Great news! BTW, am I the only one to be a bit confused when it comes to Gallium3D? I would really appreciate some insights on the current state of the project, e.g. which features are still missing and so on.
Cool blog anyway, glad to add it in my RSS feeds 😉
How to enable r300g on *Ubuntu 10.10?
I’ve been a bit surprised when I’ve booted from USB drive with Kubuntu 10.10 and glxinfo shows me almost the same output like on Kubuntu 10.04 (only OpenGL 1.5, without GLSL) on RV350. I thought that there is already r300g by default on Maverick.