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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.
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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 can pass a vga= argument to the kernel on boot to allow modes other than 80x24. See this table for possibly modes.
--srj/mmv
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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