ATI Radeon HD 2900XT Linux Performance

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..

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