Patience

Although it is obvious to anyone who has tried to use the open source drivers for the AMD R600-based devices, these Phoronix benchmarks show just how bad things are. And those tests were performed with the most absolute blending edge pre-release versions of all the software involved. In other words, it going to be a long, long time before any improvements show up in a release version. Patience, have you must.

Xorg Radeon Status

For those keeping score, X.org has a table which describes the status of the major features in the radeon driver. Needless to say I'll be keeping a close eye on this page, looking for improvements in the R600, which is the GPU family used on 3650 cards.

There is an alternate driver, called radeonhd, but it appears to be slightly behind the radeon variant, especially for 3D features. I might try the radeonhd driver anyway, just for the heck of it. Hey, I have the hardware, so I might as well experiment.