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

It's all Mesa's fault!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Proprietary driver hell

[freelunch]

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??

Standardization

[acherrington]

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.

The real question is

[IceFox]

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