Radeon Gallium3D Can Beat AMD's Catalyst In Select Workloads
Published on February 25, 2013

測試環境 :
硬體 : AMD Phenom 9500 + Radeon X1800XT system
作業系統 : Ubuntu 各發行版本
驅動 :
1. Ubuntu 各發行版本 套件庫內附 的 開源驅動 xf86-video-ati + Mesa 9.1 # 作業系統 : Ubuntu 13.04
2. Ubuntu 各發行版本 套件庫內附 的 閉源驅動 Catalyst # 作業系統 : Ubuntu 各發行版本

測試總結

The modern Radeon Gallium3D driver for Radeon X1000 (R500) graphics cards as will be found in Ubuntu 13.04 is finally competing with the discontinued R500 Catalyst legacy driver for more Linux OpenGL games. However, the performance parity mostly comes down to the games using lower-quality visuals and not very demanding game engines (i.e. ioquake3 engine rather than id Tech 4). With the more demanding games and settings, the Catalyst Linux graphics driver from five years ago is still much faster than the Gallium3D driver from this year.

It's nice to see the Radeon Gallium3D driver performing better against the Catalyst driver, but it's taken a half-decade to get to this point. There is also still the performance of the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000/6000/7000 series that is in worse shape relative to the Catalyst Linux driver. With the newer Radeon series there is also still limiting OpenGL support being capped at around OpenGL 3.1 conformance on the open-source driver while Catalyst can support OpenGL 3.3/4.3.

Moreover, there are other features that continue to be non-existent within the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver such as reputable power management, CrossFire, UVD video decoding, and the various other anti-aliasing modes.

測試結果 請見
page 2 ~ page 6

以上 提供 安裝 Ubuntu 後 應該選擇哪一種 驅動的參考
<有空 再增加 中文翻譯>

我倒覺得下列比較重要：

AMD Releases Open-Source UVD Video Support
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_opensource_uvd&num=1

Radeon UVD Support Merged Into Mesa
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM0OTA

如果知道 UVD 是啥的話，應該會對這個消息很感振奮。AMD 開源驅動的未來一片光明！

Unified Video Decoder (UVD)

Unified Video Decoder, previously called Universal Video Decoder is the video decoding unit from ATI Technologies to support hardware decode of H.264 and VC-1 video codec standards, and being a part of ATI Avivo HD technology.

UVD enabled GPUs
目前支援 UVD 的 GPU

Availability
目前實做情況

如果知道 UVD 是啥的話，應該會對這個消息很感振奮。AMD 開源驅動的未來一片光明！

剛出爐
How-To Use Open-Source Radeon UVD On Ubuntu
April 18, 2013 by Michael Larabel

0. 適用於 Linux kernel 3.10 及 以後版本

進一步 參閱
1. AMD Releases Open-Source UVD Video Support

2. The First Radeon DRM Pull For Linux 3.10

3. Install the UVD firmware for your particular hardware