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S3 Linux Driver Outperforms Its Windows Twin In Nexuiz
An anonymous reader writes "Chrome Center has done some benchmarks with the proprietary S3 Chrome 400/500 Driver on Linux and Windows. They compared Nexuiz frame rates on a Phenom II system with a S3 430 GT — the surprising result: The Linux driver outperforms its Windows equivalent, offering frame rates about twice as high on average. The question now: Is the Linux driver that good or the Windows driver that bad?"
I wish the world was like that one that you described, however looking at the long history of open source drivers in linux kernel there are few times where I see a benefit.
I will give you an example from my experience with open source drivers. You call me a troll and mod me down, as have many forums that I tried to get answers out of.
I bought a cheap little gigabit card for a home built NAS. Just to explain, $15 is within my budget and $100 is not, of course if I could afford an Intel 1gb card than most likely I wouldn't have a problem. Than again I would have a gigabit controller and no motherboard. I use to run the NAS in Windows XP. It ran without any problems, running CIFS/SMB and even FTP. I had solid performance, reasonable speed (35MB/sec) however stable meaning it would sustain itself at 35MB without going down.
I make the decision to move to an open source platform, as I wanted to get a LAMP server running on the box and put it to some good use. I installed my favorite distribution (Ubuntu 7.10) and off the bat no gigabit for my controller, no big deal, there were two drivers I could use, however one delivered 12MB/sec and the other 30MB/sec (easy solution, right?). The problem is that the second driver was also unstable. So here are my options.
Driver A:
- Low Speed
- Consistent
- No Sig Faults
Driver B:
- High Speed
- Lots of up and down
- Sig Faults or connection drops
The problem is that there is a known issue with driver b. The name of it escapes me, has 1000 in the name though. And the only answer I received was that I should have spent money I didn't have and if I didn't like it I should either use 100mbps or stop using Linux. Keep in mind that I went through SuSE and Gentoo. With mixed results on both platforms. But no holy grail.
No offense, however the last thing I want to deal with is a panel of self-loving, nothing-is-broken crowd, which will deny that there is even a problem with the driver. There is no email address, the forums aren't always an answer, there is no incentive to release the drivers on time. Once you put 20 developers in a room, you will get a bureaucracy that makes the communists seem like un-organized anarchists. I do not want to be in a position where I have to wait on a driver for the latest card, because of soap-opera drama going down with the group managing the driver. Not to mention the 2 forks you will get. And lastly the last thing I want to hear from a forum is another disappointment in FOSS where I am told that my computer is too cheap to run well, whereas my old copy of XP doesn't complain. What ever happened to "Linux can run on anything"? So far, anything is as long as it isn't "just anything".
Open source works very well on software, however I am still not convinced when it comes to drivers. If its something old (old SCSI driver or tape drive) I'll give you that, but when it comes to recent hardware, good luck. I, like most people, do not care if a driver is open source. An open source version of the ATI driver still won't make it good. And an open source version of the nVidia driver still won't make it any better. How about we clean our own back yard before chastising the world for being proprietary. How about we make Firefox faster, as the version on a closed source platform seem to run better than on my linux box.
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Regards,
Poor Anonymous Coward