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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."
Get that man on the KDE team IMMEDIATELY! His parents obviously had a grasp of the KDE naming convention long ago.
It's funny. Laugh.
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?
Umm, you're supposed to be putting the Linux CDs into the CD drive, not taste-testing them... ;)
What does a penguin taste like, anyhow?
Wow, this is very surprising. One would expect with similar Windows benchmarks for the X800 to be matching or beating the 6800 Ultra (depending on drivers of course), so these low X800 scores in Linux really are quite a shock.
Those numbers are all well and good, but I'd be interested in seeing them side-by-side with the same tests performed (on the same machines, of course) running Windows.
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.
NVidia: Sort-of
ATI: Kind-of
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
We can run Linux on a GPU now?
The situation right now is quite frustrating - all distributions should be able to ship the binary drivers for the vendor kernel. It would make it so much easier, than having to get the kernel source and headers before building the module on your own. Thats an unneccesary burden only placed on our shoulders because of some paperwork. 2nd, id like some better drivers please, the ATI drivers are terrible, please stop treating me as a second rank costumer. My money is as good as anybody elses. Thanks so far NVIDIA, now we just need a better license.
"High performance gaming on Linux certainly isn't for everyone. We spent weeks preparing for this analysis and we still ran into problems that we could not correct. So many times, we came to a solution for a problem only to find our Linux distribution had some files in a slightly different place or our file dependency tree was completely broken. These are the things that scare away people from Linux."
That is the 100% gospel truth. I couldn't have said it better myself. How then will the Linux community and game publishers overcome this (IMHO) enormous obstacle?
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.
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.
Mmmm.... Penguin flavored. *drool*
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.
see gpgpu.org for more information.
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=
Namaste
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.
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.
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!
Anytime you upgrade or replace the kernel, just run the binary again before loading X (you aren't booting straight into x, are you?). Nvidia updates the module, reinstalls the new module while removing the old one, and bam. Now boot up X.
"We're breaking out the ramen noodles. . . "
"Really? Is it someone's birthday?"
Well, that's the game's problem, not Linux's. And at least UT2004 has absolutely no problem - just run the GUI installer.
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?
Even with my shiny new (-ish) Radeon 9800, I can only get around 80 fps in glxgears - because ATI's drivers don't support Xinerama, I'm stuck with the functional, but much slower, open-source drivers. The framerates AnandTech are be getting single-headed are a dream for me.
However, having read the article, ATI claim to have some Linux announcements in the pipeline - with any luck, maybe these drivers will allow me to use both my monitors with some decent 3d acceleration.
Anyway, to anyone thinking of getting an ATI card for use with multiple monitors under linux: caveat emptor.
I don't get why some users complain about rebooting, linux and windows alike. In a company/mission critical server type situation I could see it, but for home use? My Windows XP machine takes a total of 20 seconds to shut down, pass BIOS, reboot, and hit the desktop ready to work. In that twenty seconds (which mind you, isn't very long to begin with) I can actually do that thing we forget to do, and stretch my legs and arms. Grab a cup of water, hell.. even look out the window.
The same with my slackware machine. About 25-30 seconds for a reboot. None of that bothers me because I -know- 30 seconds on my home machine doesn't mean a damn thing. I'll enjoy that time to rub my eyes, refresh myself with maybe spending that 30 seconds taking all the dishes out of the room back up to the kitchen.
Don't treat 30 seconds as a long and unbearable time unless you want to start complaining about having a manually flushing toliet in your home, followed by hands that can't wash themselves.
"We're breaking out the ramen noodles. . . "
"Really? Is it someone's birthday?"
Any questions?
This binary driver thing has got to go. As Linux gains desktop market share, pressure will increase to open up the hardware interface to the driver. It's not like hooking OpenGL to the card involves any technology that isn't well known in the industry.
A dedicated distro for gaming on Linux. End of story.
Until EVERYONE adheres to some sort of guidelines (HA! Yeah, RIGHT!), people are going to be dealing with oddball dependancies, kernel/driver issues, and filesystem layout annoyances.
Documentation all around needs to improve too, for both the Linux distros and the game makers.
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.
"We're breaking out the ramen noodles. . . "
"Really? Is it someone's birthday?"
Ha! Try to get your mother to open up a computer and install a new video card first....
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 -- Mathematics is the Language of Nature.
DRI lets X communicate with the hardware faster. X acceleration works without it, but not as well.
from Gentoo Hardware 3D Acceleration Guide.
My 9500 Pro still doesn't work and just crashes the system hard when 3D acceleration is enabled. Nobody knows this problem and nobody can explain. :(
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.
What? My (very non-technical) mother managed to install both a cd-writer and a video card the first time she opened up a computer
Thats what manuals and common sense are for.
^^
That's why ATI's crappy drivers suck. That entire page seems to be bitching exclusively about ATI's drivers. Apparently the commentary on the Nvidia drivers was on the previous page and went something like "We told it to install in yast and went init 3 and it worked." I paraphrase. In fact, only a paragraph or two on the previous page talk about Nvidia's driver, in glowing terms. The rest of it is complaining about ATI driver configuration. Then the next page (Where you got that quote) is talking about ATI driver configuration.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
frankly its a joke
nvidia has always fscked around trying to get mangled source into XFree
ATI where unable to understand what this linux thing was but people who ati trusted wrote drivers...
solution - provide the chip spec's
frankly with CG and other GPU compilers the hardware should be patented if not then what harm is there ?
giving out spec with COPYRIGHT stamped all over it only supports you
for example those XGI people could capture the market by opens sourceing the drivers (they failed under SIS because of the drivers so let people hunt bugs WITH you for a better product and respect...)
regards
John Jones
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.
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.
/usr/src/linux/.config.
/sbin/modprobe --ignore-install fglrx && { /sbin /modprobe nvidia_agp; /bin/true; } alias char-major-226-0 fglrx
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
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
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.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
You mean like my Zoran TV tuner card that hasnt worked since the 2.2 series, despite their being public specs and sources for it? Drivers are only maintained as long as the developer is around. And unless you have the skills to write your own drivers (and most of us, including large numbers of application developers, *don't*), the having specs/source or not is irrelevant.
Why not offer to pay an open source developer to update it ? At least you have that option, independent of the manufacturer's support for doing so.
You going to have the same problem with Linux kernel version 4.0, when Nvidia don't provide a driver for their XYZ card in 2010. Problem is, at that time, you won't have access to the specs, so you won't even have the option of paying an open source developer to update the driver for you.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf