I've done a few posts about the r600 chipset and Fedora Linux. I did one awhile back in April of 2008 and I did another in Sept of 2009 so I thought it was about time for another update.
First of all let me say that the r600 driver has gotten much better since April of 2008, it is hardly in the same ballpark. So I am running Fedora 12 will all the currrent updates. The 2.6.32.3-24 kernel and mesa from git. The mesa in F12 is fine, but the one from git contains support for glsl and OpenGL 2.0 vs the OpenGL 1.5 in mesa 7.7.
So lets get to the raw data...
gtkperf -c 500 -a now runs in 36 - 39 seconds on my machine (Q6600 at 2.4Ghz, 64bit, 8GB of RAM). I have switched to using compiz as my window manger which actually may slow the results down a little. And I also have found that the GTK theme can really impact the performance of GTK.
3d apps for the most part run solid, glxgears is around 2000 fps, Quake 3 runs as 90, Nexiuz is 30-40 depending on the detail. Diablo 2 under Wine gives 25fps (which is its max for the most part). I have had some issues with screen corruption when running diablo with -opengl.
My video player, fosfor, that is based on clutter and gstreamer plays quite well. Even with larger files.
So when testing the radeon r6xx driver on Linux, ensure you have the latest packages available. It really makes a difference.
