I had a completely different and unhappy experience with my FireGL 8800 card. Really, the non-proprietory driver give me better performance. A simple comparison is, glxgears give ~2700fps for non-proprietory driver, but only ~1600fps for ATI fglrx driver. I did all possible tweaks for xserver configuration (xorg.conf); ATI driver always lose. I know that glxgears is not for benchmark, but it's the same machine. Rendering a picture with non-proprietory driver is also faster. Probably the bad luck is just for FireGL 8800 card; hopefully other higher end card will do better. Mingfeng Greg Couch wrote:
You really should use the ATI graphics driver instead of the non-propreitory one. Some stuff will benchmark better with the non-proprietory one, but the overall quality and speed, across all of OpenGL features, will be better with the proprietory one. The benchmarks only measure speed.
- Greg