Linux GPU Performance

CrzyP writes "AnandTech.com has benchmarked the most popular graphics cards from ATI and NVidia on the Linux OS (SuSE 9.1). It is interesting to see that they have also written a custom benchmarking tool which can also be downloaded from the article. Take a look at Kristopher Kubicki's "Linux 3D AGP GPU Roundup" to see how each of the mid to high end cards performed on the Penguin flavored system."

Comments

Re:ATI vs nVidia

[tempmpi]

Not really, it is common knowledge that Nvidia's linux binary drivers are much better than Ati's. Not only the performance is better in Nvidia's drivers but they are also more compatible. People often had problems getting ATI's binary drivers working, while Nvidia's drivers are working without problem in most configurations and even problems like 4k stacks were fixed withhin a reasonable time.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

For Windows users not familiar with the process, the kernel must be completely recompiled for ATI or NVIDIA drivers to work.

I don't know about the ATI drivers, but this isn't true for the NVIDIA drivers. You can download an installer from NVIDIA that will create a kernel module for you and places it with the other modules. No need to recompile the kernel at all. Just load the module (if the installer doesn't do this for you) and restart your X server.

Re:...vs. same cards with Windows?

[DeckerEgo]

Here's what they noticed (more of a summary than a benchmarking):

Although this analysis did draw some pretty strong lines as to where each card stand, we were more interested in how each game performed compared to their Windows counterparts. We drew a lot of conclusions from one of our more recent video card analyses from July. Surprisingly, most of our NVIDIA video cards scaled very similarly. Wine games like Jedi Knight took a 10% to 15% hit in performance compared to the Windows tests that we did just a few weeks ago. Other games like Unreal Tournament 2004 actually showed mild signs of an increase in frame rate on the NVIDIA graphics cards. Wolfenstein: ET generally performed with similar average FPS to our video cards from 2003. However, keep in mind that the drivers used then were almost a year old.

No Americas Army?

[planckscale]

I've only played 2 games on Linux, America's Army and Postal2. Postal2 looked pretty good but torching people gets boring.

On an nVidia MX 400 card, AA is playable and actually pretty fun online, but shadows are mostly chunks of squares on the ground. Otherwise, rpg's and smoke grenades look fantastic. I wonder why they didn't do comparisons of at least AA? I would think that's one of the first games people download for Linux especially because it's free.

Oh yeah, I had some original difficulty installing the nvidia drivers on a knoppix hd install with the 2.6 kernel, but I finally got it running well and documented the installation here: http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10314 &highlight=

What about DRI?

[lspd]

You can find my benchmarks of DRI compatible cards here. They're a first attempt at benchmarking DRI and still need some tweaking.

Eric Anholt's benchmarks of DRI on FreeBSD are here.

Roland Scheidegger's comparison of the three drivers available for the Radeon 9000 (DRI, FGLRX, XIG) is here.

It's a bit surprising that the Radeon 8500 series is completly absent from this comparison. The 8500 and FireGL 8800 are still remarkable video cards.

Re:Indeed

[prisen]

No need to recompile the kernel, true - but you'll have to have your kernel's source installed in order for NVIDIA's installer to compile a custom module on the spot.

All in all, it does work really well...until you upgrade or replace your kernel, and then X of course won't work. Many times you can run the installer again, though. Simple enough!

Re:Better drivers and licensing please

[Handbrewer]

Well the NVIDIA driver installer does build a module that matches your kernel. I run Debian, and i had to apt-get the kernel source and headers, not a terrible task to do, but should not be necessary to do, just to get the newest driver. I dident say the kernel need recompilation. And you need to modify the XF86Config-4 file from "nv" to "nvidia" in the driver section and thats about it. 30 seconds is about the time yes, but only after i got the kernel headers and source, some 30-40 mbs of source, not that it matters on 10mbit, but for dialups, that would kinda suck i guess :).

Re:Except

[jejones]

It took nVidia a while to get around to releasing a driver that could deal with 4K stacks, which more recent kernels have switched to from 8K. It was a pain in the posterior for Fedora Core 2 for a while, but no longer. Maybe that's what you're referring to?

nvidia

[poohsuntzu]

There are OpenSource drivers for Nvidia video cards, however they are no where near as fast as the official binaries and can't preform 3d worth a damn.

You have to realise what you are asking here. The binary drivers that you are mentioning (which, by the way, never lock you to a certain kernel) are using the code made by ATI/NVIDIA to take advantage of their hardware's features. PixelShading, 3d processing. Each have their own way for their hardware to preform 3d functioning. This is not something they are going to disclose (they are a buisness too, remember?) and thus the open source drivers for video cards are always going to be horrid compared to the avalaible binaries.

Seriously though. Get a card that works great on linux despite the binary packaging. And I still don't see how it locks you into one kernel? Could you explain further in depth what you mean for me? Because upgrading nvidia (which must be done each time you update/replace your kernel) is as simple as shutting down the X server, rerunning the nvidia binary, and then rebooting the X server.

Re:nvidia

[erikharrison]

Have you tried to run multiple kernels with the Nvidia drivers? Everytime I booted into a different kernel, I had to uninstall and reinstall the driver. And what about 4k stacks?

Besides, you didn't answer his question - he said "What's a good card with solid open source drivers?" You said "Nvidia has open source drivers but they suck, you shouldn't care about the binary only drivers."

I'd still advocate a Nvidia or ATI card. ATI makes regular code drops to the DRI and Mesa projects, and the open source drivers are of reasonable quality, and the nv drivers are high profile, with lots of work going into them. These cards are the most likely to see solid render acceleration in the future as XAA is replaced with a new acceleration architecture, so even with the Open Source drivers you'll see best performance with stuff like Composite (the basis of much of the X11 6.8.0 eye candy) with these cards.

Of the two, ATI and Nvidia, the open source drivers seem to be of roughly the same quality in my experience, but the Nvidia binary driver is far superiour to the ATI binary driver. ATI has got more bang for your buck, the GATOS project is working to support a lot of ATI's extra features, and ATI seems minimally more involved in the community with an eye to becoming moreso.

I think that pushes things solidly in ATI's favor if you're absolutely commited to the open source driver. If you're willing to use the binary driver, things become more even - it's ATI's price versus Nvidia's better support for the card under Linux/BSD

Not quite.

[temojen]

DRI lets X communicate with the hardware faster. X acceleration works without it, but not as well.

The Direct Rendering Infrastructure (dri.sourceforge.net), also known as the DRI, is a framework for allowing direct access to graphics hardware in a safe and efficient manner. It includes changes to the X server, to several client libraries and to the kernel. The first major use for the DRI is to create fast OpenGL implementations.

from Gentoo Hardware 3D Acceleration Guide.

Re:The real question is

[Anonymous Coward]

OEM Radeon 8500 based cards are cheap and are among the fastest cards with open source 3D drivers.

Re:Odd

[Synn]

That's the difference between a vendors that supports you and one that doesn't.

NVidia isn't a problem under Linux because they actually put out decent drivers for it. But ATI support is horrid, because the company barely puts any effort into Linux drivers.

Re:plea for help....

[plcurechax]

I played around with the xfree86.conf (I think that's the name) file, switching "nv" with "nvidia" and back again.


The binary driver is called nvidia. So switch it to that, and leave it.

Read the log file (/var/log/XFree86.0.log), look for lines with (WW) and (EE). This will go a long way to track down your problems.


the DVI output on my card wouldn't work.


Do you mean a second video port? Under Linux the second port (video output) is independent of the first in the XFree86 configuration, so you have to configure it to use it explicitly. Something like 'Screen 1' or 'Option "ConnectedMonitor" "DFP" ' in the Section 'Device' should do it.

The ATI drivers are bad, but not *that* bad

[gotan]

I gathered some experience with the ATI drivers on Suse 9.1 recently and i too think that they're bad, but it got a little better lately.

While there *is* an "auto-installing" driver-package from ATI you'd better avoid that (unless they fixed a good number of bugs). Just running the package resulted in an error for me, googling around i found some hints and managed to install them: run the package in extract-mode, make manually, ignore error, make install accompanied by some messing with /usr/src/linux/.config.

there is also (for Suse 9.1) an rpm-package. Following the README in that path closely will get the video driver installed. Like nvidia ATIs driver combo too consists of a kernel driver and a n X-driver, and as usual the kernel-driver is a little fiddly to install. There is *no* (longer?) need to compile a custom kernel, you need to install the kernel source though (and really, read the README!).

Be careful though when configuring the XF86config. fglrxconfig is *not* a good idea since it asks you about mouse settings, monitor modes and whatnot, things that are running perfectly well and shouldn't be touched anyway. NVIDIA does a much better job just telling you the few lines you have to change in the config, fglrxconfig produces an XF86config-4 that is mostly useless and contains heaps of garbage.

To make the kernelmodule load automatically add two lines to the "modprobe.conf.local" (i think the first is unnecessary):

install fglrx /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install fglrx && { /sbin /modprobe nvidia_agp; /bin/true; } alias char-major-226-0 fglrx

In XF86config load "glx" and "dri" in the Modules sections and put
Driver "fglrx"
Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "no"
in the device section. If you've got access problems put:

Section "DRI"
Group "video"
Mode 0666
EndSection

After restarting the X-server (twice to be sure, and check if the kernel module loaded) "fglrxinfo" should tell you something about ATI (and not Mesa), if that works do a "sync" for good measure and try tuxracer.

In my experience the nvidia-drivers are definitely easier to install, but it's really not impossible to get the ATI-stuff running.

Re:Linux Gaming, In Summary

[Atzanteol]

I believe that's what the Linux Standards Base people are trying to fix. I've spoken to them at Linux world. Their goal is to eventually be able to have developers say "This program can run on any distro LSB1.0 compliant."