AMD Radeon Performance Preview On Linux 3.8

ith word this week that there's some performance improvements for the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver to be found with the Linux 3.8 kernel as a result of the a-synchronous DMA engine support, some very early benchmarks of the "drm-next" code were done from five different AMD Radeon graphics cards. In extreme cases, the open-source graphics driver can deliver 10x higher OpenGL frame-rates with the experimental kernel.

The "drm-next" pull hasn't even been sent in yet for pulling into Linus Torvalds' tree for the Linux 3.8 kernel, but the drm-next Git repository from David Airlie was benchmarked on 13 December. This drm-next kernel was compared to the vanilla Linux 3.7 kernel for a quick look at what's on the horizon for Linux 3.8 open-source AMD graphics performance. While the a-synchronous DMA engine support is there on the kernel side, for exploiting its full capabilities is also user-space support that has yet to be integrated into the mainline repositories.

Aside from the a-sync DMA code for the Radeon DRM driver in Linux 3.8, see this Phoronix article for details on other Radeon driver changes to be merged into this next Linux kernel release.