Last October we had compared the performance of the open-source R300 display driver against the closed-source fglrx driver for ATI Radeon graphics cards. In that comparison a Mobility Radeon X300 was used with X.Org 7.1, but we have decided to take another look at this driver comparison under X.Org 7.2. In this last comparison, the fglrx binary blob had greatly outperformed the open-source driver. While the fglrx driver remains faster, has the performance delta between these two drivers decreased?

The Linux distribution used

was Fedora 7 Test 1. Fedora 7 Test 1 ships with X.Org 7.2.0 and the ATI 6.6.3 driver. The latest fglrx driver (8.33.6) does not support Fedora 7. However, the Fedora packaging scripts have been updated and now support Fedora 7 Test 1. These updated scripts are available on the Phoronix Forums and MichaelLarabel.com. The 8.34 fglrx display drivers this month should include Fedora 7 support, but will likely contain Linux 2.6.20 compatibility issues.

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