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Open Source ARM Mali Driver Runs Q3A Faster Than the Proprietary Driver

Posted by Unknown on from the hit-the-fraglimit dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The lima driver project, the open source reverse engineered graphics driver for the ARM Mali, now has Quake 3 Arena timedemo running 2% faster than the ARM Binary driver." There's a video showing it off. Naturally, a few caveats apply; the major one is that they don't have a Free shader compiler and are forced to rely on the proprietary one from ARM, for now.

2 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. 2 whole percent? by abigsmurf · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So it's a value that's well within random fluctuation levels? Meanwhile, how's the reliability, memory usage, compatibility, performance outside of that single game?

  2. Re:2% isn't "faster", it's a measurement error by gmack · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Quite often binary drivers are written by people who, either ported the code from other Operating Systems, or must maintain the code in such as way as to be able to share the code base with operating systems having different driver models. A pure free driver can lose a lot of cruft and can often have things like memory management better tuned for the system or interact with the hardware in more efficient ways.

    The NVIDIA Ethernet driver from a few years back was a good example of that. The Linux people created a free driver that ran a lot faster than the binary driver forcing NVIDA to abandon their driver.