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Linux GPU Performance

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the how-does-your-rack-stack dept.

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."

5 of 373 comments (clear)

  1. Re:ATI vs nVidia by tempmpi · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    Jan
  2. Re:Indeed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:...vs. same cards with Windows? by DeckerEgo · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.
  4. What about DRI? by lspd · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:nvidia by erikharrison · · Score: 4, Informative

    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