Last month I alluded to a 40-way graphics card comparison being worked on at Phoronix. This comparison is to extensively compare the performance of the open and closed-source drivers for each graphics card and to comprehensively comment on other areas of the Linux graphics driver support. Not only is the OpenGL performance being evaluated, but the thermal performance, CPU utilization, and power consumption is being looked at too. Being published today to mark the beginning of the Oktoberfest 2011 articles are the ATI/AMD Radeon results. This includes 28 of the 40 graphics cards, with GPUs as old as the Radeon X800XL and as new as the AMD Radeon HD 6950.
There are over two dozen graphics cards being tested in this article. This is just the number of discrete graphics cards that were sitting around my labs when beginning the test process, with each one being a unique model. The comparison is also limited to consumer graphics cards and not the selection of FireGL/FirePro graphics processors, but that could come in another article. There are multiple graphics cards representing each generation of ATI/AMD Radeon GPUs spanning seven years (the oldest, a Radeon X800XL, was released in late 2004).
