Comment 27 for bug 1058040

@Neil Burgin - I'm glad to hear that you are satisfied with the performance of the current open-source radeon driver. There have indeed been many recent performance improvements to the open-source radeon 3D graphics driver. This includes radeon KMS page-flipping which was introduced in the 2.6.38 kernel which was used in Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal"; and the switch from the classic Mesa 3D driver to the Gallium3D Mesa driver which happened in Mesa 7.9 (used in Ubuntu 10.10) for Radeon X1000 series GPUs and earlier, and in Mesa 7.10.1 (used in Ubuntu 11.04) for Radeon HD 2000 series GPUs and later. There were further Radeon performance improvements in Mesa 8.0 (8.0.4 is currently available in Ubuntu 12.04 "Precise Pangolin") and in Mesa 9.0. Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" is using Mesa 9.0. Also, kernel 3.4 introduced 2D color tiling support for Radeon HD 5000 and HD 6000 series GPUs, which boosts performance when used in conjunction with Mesa 9.0. Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" is using a kernel which is based on the upstream 3.5 kernel.

If you ever need more performance from this driver and you have a Radeon HD 2000 or later, support for PCI Express 2.0 (PCI-E 2.0) was finally added to the open-source radeon driver in the 3.6 kernel. This has been shown to increase performance for some OpenGL workloads. A PPA of this kernel is available at http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/ and instructions on how to install and uninstall it are at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/MainlineBuilds