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Open Radeon 3D Driver Runs At 60~70% of Proprietary Driver Speed
An anonymous reader writes "AMD's Radeon HD 6000 series open-source Gallium3D driver for Linux is now working and running at 60~70% (in some cases, 80%) of the speed of the official proprietary 'Catalyst' driver. This is a big speed improvement in Mesa/Gallium3D compared to the times when the performance was crippling or even just a few years ago when AMD didn't support open-source drivers. When will NVIDIA change ways?"
Many reasons..
The binary driver cannot be redistributed with the linux distros..
The binary driver may drop support for older hardware at any point, and the older versions which still support your hardware are unlikely support current kernels or X11 versions.
You cannot fix a binary blob driver yourself, you are beholden to the vendor to do so.
Also that "100%" is relative to the binary driver itself, its possible that given time the open driver will surpass it.
Out of interest, does the open driver support OpenCL yet?
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Because proprietary drivers traditionally have minor bugs and annoyances which are getting fixed like never. Not everybody is craving for the top fps on the new games - many want speedy 2D and video without glitches. I'm not sure that OSS drivers would be better in the respect, yet IMO chances are better with two alternative drivers available.
Also, OSS drivers for both nVidia and ATI would likely exchange patches or probably reuse many common features, making them more compatible to each other, thus reducing number of surprises when something works on ATI driver but not on nVidia's.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
I have CAD at home on Linux (Draftsight for 2D and Varicad (It's Linux native!!) for 3D), and there's no substitute for the Catalyst driver. The free drivers don't cut it. They may cut it for generic desktop stuff like playing video and spinning desktop cubes, but somehow combining the free driver and any CAD package gets you a very slow experience.
Until performance really does reach 80 percent, I'm gonna have to stick with the proprietary one. And since this is only for the 6000 series and not the 4000 series (my card), I'm just gonna have to forget about it until I get new hardware.
Hands up if you've ever had to call the ATI BBS in Peterborough, ON back in the day to get the driver of the week for Mach32 on any system.
By the way, if you want free 2D Cad for Linux, get your ass over to Dassault Systems and download Draftsight.
--
BMO
Being open means that these drivers won't simply go away once the product line is deprecated in favour of the newest and coolest graphics card, and that it will be able to receive improvements and bug fixes essentially until the last working piece of hardware dies off. Being open also means that it will be able to provide support for this Radeon graphics cards in other platforms besides the officially sanctioned ones, such as Windows and Linux. Being open also provides a way to provide competition for the people AMD employs to develop their official graphics card drivers, because if an open driver developed by amateurs on their spare time happens to be nearly as good or even better then they may as well be out of a job, and they can't have that. Being open also means that, if the open drivers mature enough so that they are comparable to AMD's official offering, then it will be in AMD's best interests to get directly involved in the development of these open drivers and even abandon their proprietary offering in favour of this project.
And, obviously, if these open drivers represent a business success story to AMD then you can bet that this will spread out to other companies, and everyone who used windows and had to deal with hardware with support problems certainly knows what a PitA it is to be tied to proprietary drivers which are crap.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
I seriously doubt Nvidia is actually going to change their ways. Nvidia claims that a significant amount of their graphics technology IS the driver and that opening it up would expose too much of their IP. AMD doesn't really seem to hold this view so I'm guessing their secret sauce is more on the hardware end. In my opinion, AMD probably even has the better hardware, as seen by how it scales more linearly up to higher resolutions. Nvidia manages to come up with enough quirky driver optimization to stay competitive.
Fear is the mind killer.
You're completely ignoring the big fact that the Open Source Radeon driver also runs at 100% of its own speed. In fact, I'm willing to bet good money that ANY driver can run at 100% of its own speed.
Nope. It's a proven fact that adding a HOSTS file will improve the speed of any driver to the point that it runs at 150% of the speed of itself. The fact that this will cause a rip in the space/time continuum, making the universe implode is irrelevant, because the HOSTS file also creates 100% security from thin air, so the driver will continue to exist in perpetuity.
HOSTS files FTW! Is there anything they can't do?!
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
...it's only advantage is being Open?
I can see how many people may not see a great cost/benefits ratio there...
The main advantage of being open is long term support. Graphics card drivers are quickly abandoned by AMD once they are a few years old. So their newer drivers don't support old cards, and older proprietary drivers don't support new kernels. So your only solution when using an old card (pre HD series) with a new operating system is to use the open source driver. The problem is not limited to Linux. On Windows, AMD issues "legacy" drivers for older cards but they are not thoroughly tested. So while they fix compatibility with some software, they break it with others that were working great with the old drivers... Worse, there's no support for them. On my Linux distro, while using open source Radeon drivers, performance keeps improving with each new version.
You can pass a vga= argument to the kernel on boot to allow modes other than 80x24. See this table for possibly modes.
--srj/mmv
Careful, you may invoke APK
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Interestingly, nVidia is actually pretty good at fixing bugs.
GNOME3 had a nasty corrupt-on-resume problem with the nVidia driver, and since a) laptops are slept and resumed often, b) nouveau has no power management to speak of, which is kinda important in a laptop, and c) the GNOME devs had no intention of fixing the problem anytime soon, it was nice that d) nVidia fixed it in a month. They're pretty good with other bugs, too.
The nice thing is that, with GNOME3 and nVidia, I have the first instance of tear-free video playback on a Linux desktopin, wel, ever*.
I don't know it AMD/ATI better now, but Catalyst used to be brutal for bug fixes. I think they're better. I also don't mean to impugn Nouveau as they've done great work with what they've had, but I do value battery life and not cooking my thighs.
* without turning off compositing and partying like it's 1999.
--srj/mmv
And yet the open driver supports them anyway.
The more widespread open source becomes, the more practical alternative architectures become.
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Don't burst his bubble, that's not nice.
Because proprietary drivers will taint the kernel, and you may lose support because of that. Because one can't fix bugs in a proprietary driver, and no company will fix them fast enough or on old drivers. Because you want to add something to it. Because you want the driver that was compiled toghether with Xorg and your kernel, so anything wrong appears before distribution. Because you want the driver that (again) was compiled toghether with Xorg and the kernel, so that you'll be sure there will be no delay between the compilations and your driver will be fit to the version of the kernel and Xorg you are using.
Well, I've never had any reason out of the above. Other people experience may vary.
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Not only that, but I'm sure portions of nVidia's drivers also contain 3rd party IP as well. For them to open source that would be a breach of contract and would land them into legal trouble.
Life is not for the lazy.
4 years after they stop making the hardware, they finally mature enough to be relevant.
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Being open also provides a way to provide competition for the people AMD employs to develop their official graphics card drivers, because if an open driver developed by amateurs on their spare time happens to be nearly as good or even better then they may as well be out of a job, and they can't have that. Being open also means that, if the open drivers mature enough so that they are comparable to AMD's official offering, then it will be in AMD's best interests to get directly involved in the development of these open drivers and even abandon their proprietary offering in favour of this project.
TFA clearly states that the majority of the code was released by AMD devs and that they have recently expanded their open source driver team by adding two new members. Are you suggesting that this was all work done by the community? This is definitely not the case. Also, I would imagine that the Gallium3D driver is Linux-only and wouldn't be portable to other platforms, so they would still need the proprietary drivers for Windows.
When you think about it, if support gets better, then Linux could actually have even better AMD graphics support than Windows if Linux has the open option and Windows is stuck with Catalyst.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
Many reasons..
The binary driver cannot be redistributed with the linux distros..
Gimp doesn't distribute with the most popular Linux distro. Not all of it is license. Some of it is choice, and the fact that CDs are only so big. And this fix is quite simple if it can boot to VGA, which nvidia can. ATI could not for a long time...
The binary driver may drop support for older hardware at any point, and the older versions which still support your hardware are unlikely support current kernels or X11 versions.
You can still run a GForce2 on 11.04, so I do not see this as a problem, but a "potential" problem. Some people call that FUD.
You cannot fix a binary blob driver yourself, you are beholden to the vendor to do so.
Most users can not fix ANY driver themselves. And open source projects have lost interest and dropped support too... Admittedly, it is a strike against... Even a big strike, since no one can peer review the code. But it is far from a deal breaker.
Also that "100%" is relative to the binary driver itself, its possible that given time the open driver will surpass it.
Out of interest, does the open driver support OpenCL yet?
True, competition is good.
But what ticks me off is how fickle people are. Don't get me wrong; I am a big FOSS supporter, and involved in several FOSS projects. But I am not a purist... Nvidia was first to the party. When NO ONE was supporting Linux, they had a solid driver, with real support. It was even current! Now we have this new player at the party who ignored FOSS for almost all of it's history. Yes, they have a slightly more open license. They also have less people working on making a solid driver... But the fickle fanbois are ready to dump the one that has stood by Linux longer than almost anyone... Not me. I remember the heroes and villains longer than a year.
Oh, and Nvidia works better...
Assuming a 7000.000.000 world population, your 99.999999999% would be 7 individuals. You really think only 7 people care about open drivers?
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The nVidia vs AMD/ATI open source driver issue is all because hardware manufacturers pay for the patents in OpenGL. If you consider the driver part of the patent licensing, as nVidia does, there is no way they can open source the driver. If you consider the driver and hardware separate, as ATI does, you can open source the driver, with some caveats - namely it can't be called an OpenGL driver (it is OpenGL compatible). WINE operates similarly as a Windows compatible API.
Personally I've found nVidia's extension support has traditionally been much better than ATIs on consumer hardware, though ATI promised changes to that a couple of years ago (my newest graphics card is 2 years old and nVidia, so I haven't checked it).
Possibly, but not with Compiz or KWin. Believe me, I've tried every combination of sync and rate in both the compositor and driver and, until GNOME3, none of it worked unless compositing was turned off.
Watch the "elephant charge" or "crack of doom" scenes in Return of the King. It's gotten better over the years, but this is the first time I've seen video playback on Linux on par, well, with what Mac OS has been doing for a decade. I don't know what the Mutter devs did, but they did it right.
--srj/mmv
99.999999999% of the US didn't care that houses were being sold for far more than they a healthy housing market could bear. They didn't care that selling their house at rediculous prices and taking part in a totally unsustainable market bubble. People are short sighted and greedy. They are happily take short term gains that screw themselves in the long run.
Claiming that proprietary drivers are better because they work better right now is exactly that kind of short sightedness. AMD's move to help get open source drivers working on their hardware is specifically to prevent situations like yours where you you got bit by obsoleting GPUs. Those drivers that run at 60-70 percent of speed means that while you might take a hit, you won't be left out in the cold again. I have been bit by obsolete drivers from both ATI and nVidia so I am cautious either way.
AMD is taking the sustainable long term approach. nVidia is taking the short term more profitable approach. AMD has acknowledged their problems and are working at fixing them. nVidia is still at the party and has not yet had to deal with the falloutl
I'd suffocate both of you if could. APK is nuts, he has an excuse, what's yours?
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.