AMD RadeonSI GLAMOR 2D Benchmarks

For kicking off a new week of Linux benchmarking, to share today are benchmarks looking at three Radeon HD 7000 / Radeon Rx 200 series graphics cards on Ubuntu Linux when looking at the GLAMOR acceleration architecture performance with xf86-video-ati when compared to the proprietary Catalyst driver on the same hardware.

With the Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs and newer, the 2D acceleration is implemented only via the GLAMOR Library for having 2D accelerated via OpenGL, in turn relying upon the new but not yet mature RadeonSI Gallium3D OpenGL driver. The RadeonSI Gallium3D performance is still a ways behind Catalyst but improvements are being made. We haven't looked too much at the RadeonSI 2D performance recently let alone when compared to Catalyst, so the results today should be fairly interesting.

The graphics cards being used for this benchmarking were the Radeon HD 7850, Radeon HD 7950, and Radeon R9 270X. This graphics card comparison for 2D open-source vs. closed-source performance testing was limited to the Southern Islands hardware I had available, which is sadly limited and only these high-end SKUs.

Benchmarking happened from Ubuntu 13.10 64-bit with the Linux 3.12 Git kernel, xf86-video-ati 7.2.99 Git, Mesa 10.0-devel Git, and then compared to the Catalyst 13.11 driver (fglrx 13.25.5 / OpenGL 4.3.12614). All benchmarking was handled via the Phoronix Test Suite with a variety of 2D workloads.