Posted on Thursday, September 06 2007 @ 3:51 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Back when the Radeon X1000 "R500" series support finally
arrived for Linux, it came six months after the hardware was actually
launched and the Linux performance was down the drain. In some
benchmarks the ATI Radeon X1800XL 256MB was outperformed by the earlier
Radeon X800XL and was clobbered by the NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX being as
much as four times faster. As we have been sharing all day, the fglrx
8.41 Linux driver finally turns the table where not only the Radeon
X1000 performance is finally in order but all of their supported product
families received a very nice performance boost. Four months after the
availability of the Radeon HD 2900XT, the 8.41 fglrx driver now supports
the R600 product family under Linux. We have multiple Radeon HD 2000
"R600" GPUs at hand for testing, but in this article we are focusing
upon AMD's current flagship model, the Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB. The
performance of the Radeon HD 2900XT under Linux is certainly astonishing
after the previous performance shortcomings by ATI/AMD.Since Linux
support for the Radeon X1000 "R500" series was introduced some 17 months
ago, there has been a performance imbalance..
Read on
at Phoronix.