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. ;). "

Comments

G400s

[pridkett]

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.

Linux REALLY needs something like this

[Stiletto]

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 update the G400 benchmarks

[Mokki]

As all G400 owners should know. The BIOS default clock speeds under linux are much lower than those in Windows.

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.

Comparing DX and OpenGL

[luckykaa]

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).

TNT2 Owners

[chromatic]

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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