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Open Source ARM Mali Driver Runs Q3A Faster Than the Proprietary Driver
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.
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?
It's happened in the past that certain drivers have claimed better performance while at the same time completely ignoring certain things they were supposed to be doing in order to get the framerate up. Do the frames end up looking exactly the same with both drivers? What exactly is making it faster. Did they improve a specific part which only helps for Q3A demo files and doesn't actually make any difference when playing a real game.
All interesting questions. If only there was a long block of text which covered those points. I've never heard such of a thing though. But, I'm going to coin a new term, "TFA" to refer to the hypothetical object.
Anyone with me on this?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.