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3D Benchmarks Under Linux
Clump writes, "Linuxgames has an interesting article that benchmarks 3D cards under Linux. This is significant because most hardware is only reviewed in Windows. Had I read this before, I may not have spent $150 on a TNT2 card. ;). "
As a long-term user and fan of the Linux platform I can appreciate that it's annoying that things like this are always done in the Windows world, but in this case it does make sense - Linux is just not ready for gaming yet.
Sure, companies like Loki are trying their best, but the games they are porting are older ones which have lost that "cutting edge" feel which new games have. And there aren't many of them either, and they are only puchased by a small "hardcore" of Linux gamers. Unfortunately, Windows is still the platform for playing games on, whether we like it or not.
The situation won't really improve until Linux is made more friendly as a gaming platform. One of the main reasons why games are easily written on Windows is the DirectX API, which provides support especially optimised for every area of gaming. What Linux needs is something like this, but obviously open source so that it can be improved easily.
Until Linux gets this support I think it will always languish behind Windows as a platform. As a consequence, hardware manufacturers will be more wary about writing drivers for Linux, and they will have a lower quality than Windows ones. This will lead to the benchmarks (which will only be done on Windows to save money) not reflecting performance under Linux, as we see here.
Some of the links in the middle of the article are broken - they're suffixed with ".html" instead of ".shtml".
The "next" links on the bottom of each page seem to work though - or you can just add the "s" manually.
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It's COM (and therefore ActiveX) based. Calls within calls to interfaces. There's a very good reason why John Carmack uses OpenGL, etc. for his games- it's because DirectX isn't easy to use. Games are written to Windows only because it's the dominant computer platform.
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Note that these benchmarks are on XFree86 3.3.x that ships w/ RH 6.2 - XFree86 4.0 should change the playing field quite a bit. It's nice that these guys benchmarked with a "standard" configuration, but IIRC, RH 6.2 is compiled and optimized for a i386, not the i686 class processor that they benchmarked on. With the boost that the G400 gets from CPU, an optimized set of binaries should improve the performance on this card quite a bit.
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Redhat should be doing something about the atrocious situtation for 3D video card support in Linux. If the problem is NDAs, then I can't see a better third party to trust with releasing binary drivers - a bad situation to be in, but we live in a world that just isn't going to see Nvidia (or anyone else) give up ANYTHING that might help their competition. Waiting 3 years for a card to become obsolete and then getting register info (maybe) isn't my idea of what will make Linux the operating system of the future.
Somebody needs to step forward, someone with money and reputation to help fix this situtation. Linux isn't going to make it to the mainstream unless we can either get third party hardware manufacturers releasing register level information - again, I've got some heat-resistant snowballs for THAT day, or get someone the community trusts working to support binary drivers - hopefully on all platforms (Alpha, PPC, x86, 68k, whatever).
NVidia has been taking a lot of flak from the community, some of it deserved, but I don't think a lot of people apprecate the kind of research and development dollars it takes to make a cutting edge 3D chip. Would you expect intel to release it's manufacturing processes and schematics for the Pentium III core (or AMD's athlon) under the GPL? of course not. While we're not asking for how to make a Nvidia GeForce, I think that's what NVidia is worried about.
But, to avoid rambling, some Linux player with some power and money needs to work with us here. SGI would be another canadate, Debian is GNU/Linux, so don't hold your breath, but Redhat is in a great position to show some goodwill and long-term thinking.
Kudos (still waiting for TNT/GeForce 3D so I can nuke windows)
..don't panic
It shouldn't have to be so damn complicated -- we are talking about games, after all...
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Unless Nvidia comes out with better drivers soon, I'm going to put in an old Vodoo2 just so I can have something that works in Linux. The only reason I'm not getting a new 3d card is I spent a lot of money on my TNT2, and I allready had more urgent upgrades planned for over the summer, like a bigger hd. If Nvidia dosen't get their act together soon though, I'm definitly going to get my next video card from someone else
I always prefer to start the year off with a bang - or, to be more precise, a series of loud hums, a crackle or two, and
Okay, so I'm a matrox bigot. I'll preface this post by saying that. I have a Matrox G400Max in my home system and a Voodoo 3 3000 (I think) in my work system. Overall I'm more impressed with the visual quality of the Matrox. There are just some things voodoos can't do. I belive 32 bits is one of them. But the real reason I bought the G400 was because of two factors - OpenGL in a window in X and Dual Monitor Support. Most programmers will agree that openGL in a window is much better for development as you can see debugging information while running the program. Do that with a V3 in linux. Although dual head support on one AGP isn't here yet, it will be soon in XF4. When only displaying on one display the matrox is usuing only one of the two separate ramdacs on it. It's akin to only using a single processor on a dual processor system. It's rather a shame. The only downside to the G400 is that I can't play soulblighter accelerated as its glide for linux. But I suppose that's why I keep the monster 3d around.
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Although the common Joe or Jane user doesn't really care about WinMark, WinBench, 3DBench, etc. scores, these are very important to OEM's and companies who purchase large volumes of PC's and peripherals.
If the community's goal is to get Linux adopted by more mainstream companies (note I said _IF_) a standardized performance testing suite is definitely going to have to be put together.
As far as video cards go, comparing Quake 3 scores is a start, but it's not the final word in 3D performance. There are very comprehensive test suites out there for 3D implementations that need to be ported or replaced on Linux.
We already have Viewperf (sorry, I can't find the link) which is an excellent cross-platform 3D benchmark. I believe its results much more accurately reflect the quality of a 3D implementation than, for instance Quake, which is heavily biased towards fast texture-mapped triangles (yes there is a 3D world out there besides texture-mapped triangles!)
A test similar to the OpenGL conformance test would also be nice, to make sure that 3D implementations out there for Linux are not "cheating".
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The author will redo the tests with correctly clocked G400 when he gets back from a business trip. See this forwarded post at Utah-GLX mailing list
Also, as the G400 is quite much CPU bound in the tests, I would believe that compiling the GLX with better gcc parameters should also have had an effect to the scores.
DirectX includes DirectDraw, DirectSound, Direct3D, DirectInput. All of these are designed to work together.
OpenGL has glut.
One point to DX for flexibility.
OpenGL has had implicit support for accelerated hardware Transform and lighting since Beta versions.
DirectX has only had support for this since version 7. Applications have to be specifically coded to support it.
Score is 1-1 so far.
Claims that DirectX is faster due to lower function call overhead are not strictly speaking true. Use of Display lists will speed up OpenGL.
I think I'll call this one a draw.
OpenGL has a very easy to understand API.
DirectX is cryptic, and still requires some Windows coding to set up the display.
Another point to OpenGL.
Direct3D allows you to test whether operations are hardware accelerated and turn them off if the quality improvement isn't worth the speed loss.
OpenGL will always emulate this in software
Since this is about fast games, I think DirectX deserves a point here.
DirectX has better software emulation speed.
DirectX has better Windows hardware support
OpenGL has better non Windows support. This includes Macs. This reduces the cost of porting games.
This points to a general benefit to using DirectX, but does not make it "Far superior". What OpenGL really needs is a set of other API's that are suitable for games, and are compatible (and similar in structure).
If you're wondering why nVIDIA cards weren't reviewed, I've put up a couple of pages with information about the company and the saga of their "Linux support". The current rumor is that they have binary only drivers for XFree86 4.0 using their own straight-to-hardware pipeline (instead of DRI), and they're not really concerned about Linux users in general.
Link is here.
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