One of the common complaints about the ATI Catalyst Linux driver is slow 2D performance, but is this really the case? Does AMD's binary-only Linux driver have 2D performance issues that could actually make it run slower than the open-source driver developed by the X.Org community through specifications released by AMD? In this article we have run a total of 28 benchmarks looking squarely at the 2D performance between the Catalyst (fglrx) driver and the xf86-video-ati (Radeon) drivers on Ubuntu Linux.

This testing is quite simple, we took an ATI Radeon X1800XT 256MB graphics card and looked at the 2D performance using the Catalyst 8.12 / fglrx 8.56.4 driver and then again with the xf86-video-ati 6.10.0. The rest of the hardware consisted of an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 at 4.00GHz, ASUS P5E64 WS Professional motherboard, 2GB of OCZ DDR3 memory, 160GB WDC WD1600JS-00MHB0 SATA HDD, and a Samsung SyncMaster 305T 30-inch LCD at 2560 x 1600. On the software side we were using Ubuntu 8.10 with the Linux 2.6.27 kernel, GNOME 2.25.1, X Server 1.5.2, GCC 4.3.2, and the default EXT3 file-system. For carrying our our tests we used the Phoronix Test Suite.

You can read the entire article at Phoronix.