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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."
Isn't NVidia refusing to allow driver support for recent linux kernels on some of their cards?
What good is good GPU performance if you have to run an old kernel to run the GPU at all?
If it weren't for the spinless Mesa developer for switching away from LGPL licence just to please the incompetent xfree crew, we would have major companies contributing open codes, instead of having them taking stuff and releasing slower, buggy, proprietary drivers.
Remember ALSA? It sticks its gun to GPL right down to the driver, and Creative actually donate SBLive driver for it, when the company was already crushing everyone else (Aureal included) sound card market! This should be how Mesa license the code, not the lame, bogus, xfree licence.
see gpgpu.org for more information.
As someone who keeps a Windows 2000 box around 95% for gaming, its nice to see however, that things have come a long way since I last looked seriously at Linux Gaming. Of course the game I play most (Half Life - well, its mods anyways) has no native support, and it doesn't look like HL2 will either. However, games like UT2004 and Doom 3 are among games that I truly enjoy playing and do have native Linux binaries. Seeing this article that says installing drivers for my Nvidia card are now simple (at least in Suse, I usually run Fedora) makes me think about going dual boot on my gaming machine just to start trying a conversion to Linux gaming.
Which is why I believe the "desktop Linux" is doomed to fail, ultimately.
For servers, you want all of the customizability you can get. You want users who can tweak the most minute of details, because the system's performance and security depends on it.
On the other hand, that doesn't bode well for desktop applications, which rely on certain system assumptions in order to work properly. Microsoft's OS model makes for weak security, in this, but when you buy an application made for Windows, you can be pretty certain it's going to work out of the box.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
Well, to be fair, the article said installing the nVidia drivers was easier then it was in windows for SUSE. Thats pretty good if you ask me. Its just ATI that is acting badly when it comes to these drivers, if you read the article you'll see that basically all the problems where with ATI's crapware drivers.
That said, I have an ATI card in my laptop, and it runs relatively slowly compared to what it would have if I went with windows, but it was easy to setup and use. I think SUSE might be involved in a lot of those problems...
But really, yeah, gaming in linux isn't for the average person really unless he has an nVidia, then it really should not be too hard...
And as far as game developers go... its not their problem to make distros easy. They should just make it work on their machines and go from there. nVidia's basically proved that binary drivers can be done well on linux (and fuck you to the zealots trying to ruin it for the gamers by their constant bitching) and when ATI catches up -- and word is they are going to be doing a driver push soon -- things should be better.
We'll just wait and see what happens!
--SD
"Computers will never truly be free until the last windows user is strangled with the entrails of the last mac user."
How then will the Linux community and game publishers overcome this (IMHO) enormous obstacle?
Maybe if a site analogous to the Linux Counter were established, to count the number of Linux gamers, recording hardware, games played under Linux, games we wish we were playing under Linux, etc...
The root of the problem is a lack (though obviously it's not as bad as it was) of communication. So maybe if we could tell more companies that Linux gamers are numerous enough to be worth pleasing, we could get some results.
I'm running an nVidia card on Fedora 2 (x86-64) and the installation went flawlessly. After a few trivial X11 config changes to let the X server know about the new video card, DVI and accelerated OpenGL worked like a charm.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
I have an Nforce2 based MB with built-in video..
For a few months I ran Nvidia's proprietary driver but found that their support was poor. Countless people would report the same problem and Nvidia would basically just shrug and not even reply to the postings on their website. Stuff like "not our problem". They were very slow to support 2.6.
And as a gentoo user, I hated the binary installation program.
I finally dumped their stuff and went to the OSS driver. It is much slower, even when just opening new browser windows or xterms. But not having to mess with nvidia installer hell each time I gen a new kernel (which is pretty rare, actually) makes it worth it.
This was a great article, however, because it shows just how much chance and luck there is in getting these drivers to work. Buying the latest and greatest MB and CPU for use with Linux is still a huge unknown for the novice and experienced Linux user alike. And then there is the very real fear of whether it will work after you upgrade your kernel, etc.
Sad to see that Nvidia is the most Linux friendly vendor??
In my opinion this is the best thing to happen to linux in some time. Any time that you can develop standards for an industry, you can finally give a target for competitors to aim at (e.g. each other). This will drive competition and really drive the market forward. I would consider this a first step forward.
After both ATI and nVidia clobber each other with better framerates and better overall performance, I think that a new competitive advantage will develop... perhaps this may be better graphics quality or easier installs.
Victory is gained, not in knowing your opponents next move, but in preempting them.
A man who cares about performance on the KDE team? Well if it works out, the result might be something good.
:-)
They seem to know something about improving performance. Try a recent KDE release, you'll be surprised.
Heading back to the topic, I've been very impressed with the Nvidia drivers when using SuSE 9.0. Fast, completely stable, and dead easy to install - and that's with the standard Nvidia installer. With 9.1, it's supposed to be even easier...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
This is why many notably amazing Linux apps (GIMP, gaim, evolution, hell even firefox) reject QT in favor of GTK. If QT was made to look cleaner and KDE's defaults/usability was more refined, it would be far more successful.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Q3 and UT2004 are both very CPU intensive, so who knows if the speed is due to the drivers or the platform.
Maybe they're built with super-mega-optimizing flags on linux that they don't use on Windows. Maybe it's the sound or input routines. Both were developed in linux, AFAIK.
My point is, it's true enough to say that Q3 performs better in linux, but that doesnt necessarily mean the OpenGL drivers for linux are better than Windows. I'd say that, at best, they'd be pretty much the same.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Planning to plunk down some money soon and what I want to know is: What is the best video card you can get that works in Linux that *doesn't* require binary drivers? I don't perticularly care to be locked into one kernel if given the option. -Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
Who cares about the gamers. Workstation 3D is what Linux needs.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
It's not only the booting process, it's stopping and starting the applications,too. Closing my web-brwoser including every application and if you testdifferent settings these 30 seconds sumup plus you need timeto reopen the wizard...
ATI is to small to spend time writing good drivers for the 3 linux gamers out there.
nVidia is big enough to burn a few man hours doing so, although their linux drivers are nowhere near the Windows ones in terms of performance (IMO).
Are you joking?
ATI is not the behemoth that it used to be in the 1990s, but it still has over 2500 employees worldwide. Nvidia has approximately 2000.
While the Nvidia driver are most likely better, their benchmarks used 64 bit drivers for Nvidia versus 32 bit drivers from ATI. I wish they would have tested 32 bit Nvidia drivers as well to compare Apples to Apples.
GLX is a an API for writing OpenGL applications for X. DRI is a common interface for OpenGL drivers to write directly to hardware, bypassing the X rendering layer. They're completely different things, and DRI is pretty much mandatory if you want decent OpenGL performance.
The exception is the nVidia drivers which don't use the common DRI, instead providing their own mechanism for direct rendering. I assume this is related to the amount of common code between their Windows and Linux drivers - easier for them to maintain their own framework than to support DRI on Linux and something else on Windows.