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Valve & Intel Collaborating On Open-Source Drivers
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like Valve's Linux team that's still growing has found much interest in open-source graphics drivers. Intel Linux graphics driver developers and Valve's Linux team were meeting for the past week to look at each other's code, work out performance goals, and collaborate on new features. Ian Romanick of Intel blogs, 'The funny thing is Valve guys say the same thing about drivers. There were a couple times where we felt like they were trying to convince us that open source drivers are a good idea. We had to remind them that they were preaching to the choir. :) Their problem with closed drivers (on all platforms) is that it's such a blackbox that they have to play guess-and-check games. There's no way for them to know how changing a particular setting will affect the performance. If performance gets worse, they have no way to know why. If they can see where time is going in the driver, they can make much more educated guesses.' Perhaps the companies are paying attention to Linus Torvalds' memo to NVIDIA?"
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If Intel gives a shit about open source graphics drivers, where are the open drivers for their Atom IGP?
Licensed from PowerVR so not their IP, but next year it looks like they'll replace it with their in-house Ivy Bridge graphics in the "Valley View" Atoms. But if you got an Atom today and want good open source support, you're shit out of luck.
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I've had a gamut of issues with openGL support on linux over the years. NVIDIA was the easiest to get working and by far the best support (in my experience anyway) but was by no means bug-free. Intel drivers and chipsets remain schizophrenic at best and let's not mention S3 or other laptop chipsets.
Hopefully these guys can add some weight into the push for better video support from both Intel and NVIDIA.
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I don't know exactly what they were thinking; but Intel's licensing of PowerVR GPUs somehow seemed to exclude video drivers that don't suck in any form, much less fully open. One would have thought that chipzilla could have gotten better terms, especially if they were planning a part for the embedded market...
The 'GMA500' and 'GMA600'(SGX 535, at different clock speeds) and 'GMA3600' and 'GMA3650'(SGX545, also differing in clock speed) all have tottering heaps of crap for drivers. Even if you don't care about license, they aren't exactly catching Nvidia in the 'actually works while tainting your kernel' department.
The rest of the GMAs are pretty unexciting; but are in-house designs and don't seem to have the same epic driver woes.
You don't need to download them from anywhere. They are in the mainline kernel.
Agreed, this is about Valve and Intel /teaming up/ to make their drivers /better/. Intel hasn't had the man-hours or budget to work on graphics that NVIDIA has had over the years? They've only started caring about gaming-class graphics what, two years ago, if that? Now that they do care and now that they're going to town with a first rate gaming group maybe they'll get better than NVIDIA and AMD really quickly. In fact, though, they don't need to get even to the same level as NVIDIA and AMD to be on my radar -- they just have to beat two or three generation old graphics, since I tend to play three or four generation old games -- I /just/ got Mirror's Edge and I'll be running it on an NVIDIA 400-series card. If Intel can beat the 500-series by the time I build a new computer I'm not buying a discrete graphics card for it.
I am not the AC above, but on our behalf I would like to apologize for our overreaction.
In Valve are serious about gaming on a linux base, it can't be at the ground zero of current Intel GFX. Well, it can - but I won't be the slightest bit interested.
Well Valve can't be serious about Windows gaming either, because even their most recent games still run pretty well on Intel graphics.
In Valve are serious about gaming on a linux base, it can't be at the ground zero of current Intel GFX. Well, it can - but I won't be the slightest bit interested.
Well Valve can't be serious about Windows gaming either, because even their most recent games still run pretty well on Intel graphics.
Valve seems to understand better than many game developers that pretty frames that take a lot of GPU power to render do not necessarily make good games.
So why was it modded down?
You are welcome on my lawn.
To put it more succinctly:
Valve understands that a *fun* game will be fun. As long as the graphics are good enough to support the gameplay, the ame will be fun whether you're running it at 2006-era graphics or at 2016-era graphics.
Valve understands this. They make a fun game, then make it run on the lowest hardware they expect will be commonplace. They design their system to be scalable. They allow features to be disabled, have an extensive set of shader fallbacks. Examine this somewhat-outdated wiki page detailing the features enabled and disabled for each DirectX level in the original Half-Life 2. That's no longer current, I believe - they patched it to use a newer engine revision that I think dropped support for some of the lower levels, and I know it added higher ones.
I have played that game many times on many different computers. It was fun on my Athlon 3000, Radeon X700 build. It's fun on my dual-Xeon, Radeon X1900 rig. It was fun on my Core 2 Duo, GeForce 9600M laptop. It was fun on my Phenom II X3, Radeon 4830 build. It would probably be fun on this new Core i7, GeForce 660M laptop, but I haven't replayed it yet on this.
The only machine it wasn't fun on? My ancient Pentium II, Rage Pro laptop, and that was because it glitched like crazy - corrupted textures, BSOD after a few minutes. The machine just could not handle some of the things that were actually necessary for gameplay - the Havok physics (used in puzzles), the fade-in shaders (used for one-way gates), the dynamic lights (used to highlight gunfire). Remove those, and it wouldn't have been a fun game, so Valve just didn't remove it.
But the rest? Water refract/reflect shaders? Rim lighting? Normal maps? Soft shadows? Turn them off if necessary. They don't make the game less fun. Less immersive, perhaps - that's why they have them as an option - but the fun doesn't change.
And the fun is what is important.
Don't forget the PowerVR GPUs they used in several chipsets which last I checked are black box as well.
Lets face it folks, if you care about FOSS drivers you really only have one choice when it comes to GPUs, and that is AMD. they are opening up all their code as fast as their lawyers can sign off, they have gone coreboot over UEFI, it seems since taking over ATI that AMD has gone above and beyond trying to be FOSS friendly, even hiring devs to help the FOSS devs get up to speed quicker on the drivers.
So if the FOSS community wants FOSS drivers they need to put their money where their mouths are and buy AMD across the board. only by showing that supporting FOSS increases sales will you get other corps to sign off on opening up their drivers. The fact that damned near every forum talking about FOSS and GPUs ends up with a bazillion "LOL buy Nvidia" tells me that frankly you might as well accept binary blobs and a hardware API, because obviously the community doesn't care about FOSS over convenience.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.