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Nvidia Doubles Linux Driver Performance, Slips Steam Release Date
leppi writes "Nvidia has announced a huge increase in Linux gaming performance for their GeForce R310 drivers after almost a year of development alongside Valve and other game developer partners. Nvidia's announcement also indicated the Steam beta for Linux should be out today. Quoting: 'Available for download at www.geforce.com, the new R310 drivers were also thoroughly tested with Steam for Linux, the extension of Valve's phenomenally popular Steam gaming platform that officially opened to gamers starting today. ... Comparing 304.51 driver performance of 142.7 fps versus 310.14 driver performance of 301.4 fps in beta build of Left for Dead 2. All tests run on the same system using Intel Core i7-3930K CPU @ 3.20GHz with 8 GB memory, GeForce GTX 680 and Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit.'"
Update: 11/06 21:00 GMT by S : Valve has gone ahead and announced the Steam for Linux Beta. They've sent invites to a number of people who filled out the application, and they'll be inviting more as the test goes along. The beta test is available for installation on Ubuntu 12.04, with support for other distros to come: "We intend to support additional popular distros in the future; we’ll prioritize development for these based on user feedback."
10 % better than Windows if the numbers at
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/display/geforce-gtx-670_4.html
can be used straight away (which they possibly can to some extent as Left for Dead 2 probably isn't CPU bound) for GTX 680
Windows - 276 fps
Linux - 301.4 fps
Quite an improvement anyhow!
Congratulations to all involved!!!
Can any driver developers comment on how this was achieved? I know I haven't been programming OpenGL for very long, but all I see it doing is writing the data to the card and running the shaders on that data. Data transfers should already be going at full speed, so I don't see much possible improvement there. I also can't see how shader compiler improvements could result in doubled performance. Typically, compiler changes speed things up by a few percent and I don't believe that nVidia's compiler was that bad before. So what was sped up exactly? And frankly, aside from compiling the shaders and memcpying data to the card, I'm puzzled what the driver is doing anyway?
Have they changed their stance on their Optimus feature that they infamously said "would never be supported under linux"? For those unaware of it, laptops now ship with 2 GPUs : a small one, low performance and low conso, usually an Intel one, and a high-end one, that is started when GPU intensive tasks are started. Optimus is the undocumented feature that allows to switch between these two.
It is not supported in the linux nVidia driver, it was said by nvidia official they would never support it and they didn't even give the OSS developers the little hints they need to make a workaround.
Unless this silliness (that made Linus call them many names) is solved, I am unlikely to buy any laptop with a nVidia board.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
That was true in the Windows 7 era. PCs that come with Windows 8, on the other hand, ship with UEFI secure boot turned on, and users may need to figure out how to disable secure boot first.
Microsoft will no doubt get dragged into court over that. Count on the EU if no one else. In the mean time if I have to boot to the bios to switch it off I will, and Linux vendors have various workarounds. Another alternative is to buy Linux pre-installed. Endpcnoise has some fine machines with Ubuntu preinstalled. Their discount for choosing LInux instead of Windows is quite attractive. I call this dying gasp time for Microsoft. They haven't hit the really steep part of the cliff yet, but they will and they know it.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.