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Intel's Linux OpenGL Driver Faster Than Apple's OS X Driver
An anonymous reader writes "The open-source Intel Linux graphics driver has hit a milestone of now being faster than Apple's own OpenGL stack on OS X. The Intel Linux driver on Ubuntu 13.04 is now clearly faster than Apple's internally-developed Intel OpenGL driver on OS X 10.8.3. when benchmarked from a 'Sandy Bridge' class Mac Mini. Only some months ago, Apple's GL driver was still trouncing the Intel Linux Mesa driver."
Well, that is great news, but if Intel played a hand in its development, then that would only make sense if Intel did NOT play a hand in helping Apple develop the Apple version of the OpenGL driver.
Since Intel is the creator of the architecture for the video hardware in question, it would be only sensible for Intel assisted development to be better than development that occured without Intel's help.
Either way, go go Gnu/Linux (and open source!) !!!
News at 11!
For all you integrated GPU haters and Intel haters... the Intel Linux drivers are straight up excellent. I do not believe there are better Xorg drivers available in Linux, including NVidia. Intel has really been diligently working to make their Xorg drivers work well and they deserve credit. For desktop work, HD video and other non-first person shooter use cases both the hardware and the drivers are a godsend and I thank Intel.
Not really an accomplishment. Apple's OpenGL drivers have always been under par. This is equivalent to being proud of yourself for being able to beat a gimp in a race.
A company that makes and designs chips is better at coding drivers to those chips than a PC maker that just sources those chips as components... Why is this shocking?
Is slashdot the only source of traffic to phoronix? Basically every one of their silly unscientific 'comparisons' makes the front page. Has been this way as long as I can remember.
Linux doesn't beat the gimp, Linux is the gimp.
Yeah because making fun of physically challenged people just to insult an operating system isn't extremely bigoted or ignorant or offensive or anything...
why can't ati / nvidia / intel have there own driver downloads for OSX like they do for Linux and windows?
I use GIMP for all of self-fulfillable my photo manipulation needs. GIMP would probably be able deal with the remainder of those needs if I would RTFM
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
Yeah because getting bent out of shape over a word, any word, is asinine in and of itself.
Great news for all those OpenGL games out there like Minecraft and um....
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I could really use this, since my crappy Intel GMA 950 graphics won't play Portal on Linux. I'm sure this amazing driver update will allow it now.
But no one there to hear it, see it, smell it !! It is like Windows 8 only without the agony of defeat !!
Glad to see the progreess, maybe the competion will eventually lead to better OpenGL support in OSX too.
Now where the heck is the OpenCL support for i7 on Linux ?!
Perhaps Intel could put a bit of effort into releasing (GPU) OpenCL support for their i7 Ivy Bridge line then? For the same chip there's a Windows driver, but not for Linux. But for Xeon it only works for Linux but not Windows. It has been promised for a year, still nothing.
Their efforts so far seem to have been shipped off to another team, who did something in parallel to the rest of the community, so likely a dead end.
As demonstrated here, surely they have the resources?
Get with the program guys!
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Then why does it always seem to be the weakest-minded people who are the ones complaining about "political correctness"?
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
What's really asinine, is getting bent out of shape chastising other people for getting bent out of shape.
I have an idea: let's all just never post any comments again.
Because you pulled that out of your ass.
I have nine asses and find your post extremely offensive.
For better or worse, Apple tries to sheild its customers from the driver instability/incompatibility that has affected (mostly) DOS/Windows over the last couple decades. Yes, they have given up a lot of choice in graphics cards, but most Mac users would rather have graphics that only run at 85% speed but that crashes much less often.
well there's this guy
and then there's these guys
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
There isn't OpenCL for Intel chip Mac either. I haven't tried it, but am told that the Windows OpenCL stuff is dog slow on the Intel 4000. Perhaps it isn't worth bothering with?
W.T.F. does 'GIMP' have to do with physically challenged (I think you are too timid to write 'disabled') people?
I suspect you of choosing to interpret what was written in way that enables you to choose to take offense, where non was offered.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Okay, so now we know that the drivers themselves are faster at rendering OpenGL content, but are they accurate? I know that, in the past, both AMD and nVidia have resorted to not quite properly rendering things to get their cards to perform better in benchmarks, does anyone know if any of that is going on here?
hey!
Although Nvidia's binary driver tend to be rather fast,
Nvidia has been a rather bad citizen regarding drivers.
They don't offer any help for opensource drivers, at least not the desktop ones (well, at least things are starting to move for the Tegra, thanks to the strong dominance of linux in the embed market).
And they don't play well along other linux technologies. They prefer to do things their way (which is trying to do an as straigh as possible port of their windows code-base) which sometime leads to missing feature, instead to use the facilities which are developed by the kernel folk. (e.g.: the whole Linus' "Fuck You!" scandal). Optimus whould have been implemented much earlier, had Nvidia decided to start collaborating with other effort in that direction. (Well on the other hand, the OSS community wasn't that much helpful when they decided to finally try using DMA-BUF).
So although Nvidia's drivers are fast, they are just a monolithic bloc of proprietary secret and doesn't elegantly interface with everything else. They are not nice.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I guess its because on Windows/Linux you see that there is driver bugs on each version of the driver, so all Apple really needs to do is to create testsuit, not tell there is a testsuit, and then test the driver. If it has bugs that is found, do not approve the driver. If there is a update, but there is no real improvement, do not update the driver, etc.
Seeing the insane bugs that pile up and that is version specific, at some point it makes too much sense, especially since drivers are maintained.
It's actually starting to show its age. I've recently switched back to windows 8 (with classic shell) and will probably never give OSX the time of day again. The fact that I have to go back to the main screen to do anything with the menu bar, task bar, and a file manager that hasn't changed in 15 years started driving me insane. There were some other quirks as well - like the END key doing something completely different in every single application I used that drove me to switch. In any case, I tried it, for a few years actually. I'm not trolling, I just think that Apple has dropped the ball with the OSX UI/UX - in favor of developing all their iGadgets.
Another terrible Phoronix article. The hardware is different... different core count, different chipset, it isn't even clear if they are using the same IGP.
The machines that run only HD3000/HD4000 on the mac side apart from the mini are macbook airs and the 13" MBPs.
On the resolutions those machines run natively (i.e., 1440x900 and lower, apart from the retina), the OS X driver looks to be 25-30% faster...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
When you post stuff like that, and fanboys mod it to +5, it looks really silly. The reason isn't because it is not true, but because it is not impressive. Yes, Linux has a few games for it including some older Source games. Yay. Trying to imply that because it has Steam it has games is silly. Roughly 6 of my 163 Steam games will run on Linux and most of those are the older Source engine games.
Having Steam doesn't mean you get games. It means there's a platform to sell games on that many Linux users will hate on (costs money, has DRM, no source code). The games themselves have to be ported and so far, not much of that has been going on.
It does not strengthen your point when you go and make a rather silly argument. The "but it has Steam!" argument that keeps getting trotted out when someone comments on Linux and gaming reminds me of Mac users back in the 90s pointing to the 10 or so old titles you could find in the store as proof that there were plenty of games on the Mac.
Linux gaming is not in a good state currently, and trying to mask that is silly.
If you need/want 3D performance you should still get a discrete video card.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
Re: The real question is how fast the Windows driver is... You should ask the twelve people silly enough to run boot-camp windows on overpriced Apple laptops for the windows 8 driver experience. Didya notice no-one else even brought that up? No one cares, perhaps? That's turning into a BSD / HURD kind of joke now, isn't it? When will it turn into "Netcraft confirms that MS Windows is dying..." ???
I just hate it when some supposedly "hardcore" gamer redefine "games" to refer to certain watt-sucking/heat-sink-busting games. FYI there are plenty, at least hundreds, maybe even thousands of games for Linux (if you're willing to go the grey market emulator route). Maybe not games as visually impressive as Crysis. But they're there. A simple "apt-cache search games" or its Fedora/rpm equivalent should prove my point.
Maybe Intel too feels more comfortable developing on an open platform, where you have the sources of the kernel, Xorg, etc. About Windows, you must support it for numerical/marketing reasons.
There isn't OpenCL for Intel chip Mac either. I haven't tried it, but am told that the Windows OpenCL stuff is dog slow on the Intel 4000. Perhaps it isn't worth bothering with?
Wrong. There most certainly is OpenCL for Intel chip Macs. You may be talking about the Intel Shared Memory HD4000 portion of Intel's architecture. That's all on Intel.
OSX could be less efficient.
OSX could be hampered by a protected path.
OSX drivers for OpenGL could be programmed by barely competent programmers. It's not like it's a big selling point of OSX, how well it does 3D graphics.
But since you think the ONLY way it makes sense is if Intel didn't help OSX enough, then I guess that shows your bigotry.
see subject
A graphics driver isn't "slow" or "fast" per se. The developers benchmark important apps, look for things that keep the speed down in these important apps, and try to improve things. The effect is limited by (1) what the graphics card can do, (2) time invested by the developers, and sometimes (3) the willingness to cheat in public benchmarks. (3) shouldn't be a big factor; if ATI and NVidia posted benchmarks, I'd watch out for that.
Now an important factor is that this process will improve apps that the developers believed to be important; other apps will get less improvements. An app that nobody cares about might run into a speed bump that could easily be fixed, but it doesn't get fixed because nobody cares. And here we run into a problem with the posted benchmarks: They are all apps that are primarily used on Linux, and that no MacOS X user has ever heard of. Therefore, we may assume that no OpenGL developer at Apple has ever looked at these apps and has tried to remove speed bumps in these apps. Therefore, these apps might very well be non-typical.
Consider a situation where a developer can use two techniques A and B, which should in theory run equally fast. And for some reason A runs faster on MacOS X, and B runs faster on Linux. So Mac app developers tend to use A, and Linux app developers tend to use B. As a result, Mac driver developers will try to improve A, while Linux driver developers will try to improve B. Which makes the speed difference bigger, Mac and Linux developers will even more tend to use on technique over the other, driver developers will optimise more and make the difference bigger. After a while, an app using A will run considerably faster on a Mac, while an app using B will run considerably faster on Linux. If you then port the Linux app to MacOS X, it will make you believe that the Linux drivers are faster.
Different kernels.
Different user environment.
Different services running.
Different implementations of the OpenGL API
But I'm sure it's the driver, and only the driver making the difference here. What a ridiculous comparison.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Nvidia does:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/macosx-313.01.01f03-driver.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/mac-driver-archive.html
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Because there is absolutely no documentation or support for development on Mac from Apple? They sure don't have a whole section of documentation specifically for OpenGL. Or driver development. Apple also doesn't put hundreds of their engineers in a convention center for a week specifically to answer developer questions every year, or stream any of those sessions for free over the Internet. And they definitely don't have a track at that event specifically for graphics and games. Oh, and no one has ever seen the source code for the kernel inside of Mac OS X either.
Besides, do you really think that if Intel called up Apple and said "Hey, we'd really like to bump up the performance of the integrated GPUs that you're buying on your systems by helping you with some driver optimization for OpenGL" that Apple would reply "Go fuck yourself in your own face, we want slow, inefficient drivers!" ??
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
So why wouldn't they move this time?
Because this time it's Linux?
Ok, so we can conclude that Apple's platform and/or politics must really suck if, *given all that*, ati / nvidia / intel still don't develop for it. Happier now?
Except that they do.
Nvidia publishes both drivers and CUDA for Mac OS X. AMD makes the ATI drivers that are in Mac OS X, but lets Apple do the distribution in point releases.
What else you got?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The only thing that your wisdom and sarcasm have not explained yet, is why in your opinion Intel prefers spending time and money developing for linux than for Mac, given that (as you say) Mac is as open as Linux, that Apple is one of their best customers, that Intel could get as much technical support from Apple as they like, and that linux is not minimally as "mainstream" on desktops as Mac.
OS X has never been the king of performance or speed. Responsiveness and a clean, elegant UI? Yes. Winning benchmarks left and right? No. Companies making apps for Macs generally don't make them because OS X is the most efficient or performant OS on the market, and this news isn't going to make them switch to Linux. Also, because for most people the main reason for buying an expensive Mac is OS X, they aren't likely to switch to Linux because the OpenGL driver works slightly faster.
I never said that Mac OS X is as open as Linux, but thanks for that. As I can't testify to the motivations of a multinational corporation, I can only take a guess at why they are developing the Linux drivers, and that guess would be that there was incredible room for improvement in what was pre-existing, and that Intel is the only developer that is going to do the work.
Besides, developing GPU drivers is hardly a business where you have to exclusively work on one platform or another. Who's to say that they don't have someone else working on a Mac OS X kext as well which just hasn't been released yet? I can't say that they don't, and neither can you. So there's another straw man that you're trying to stand up. They can work on all platforms at the same time, because they probably have more than one developer working for them.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
It's not only a question about opensourcing drivers.
It's also about them at least fixing their blobs to get the missing features working. Like having actual graphics on optimus laptops.
The necessary API and Hooks are here: DMA-BUF has been used to pipe GPU 3d-accelerated content onto non-accelerated USB displays.
IT just took them an eternity before starting to consider this.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Well, Left 4 Dead 2 is now in Beta on steam with a Linux client.
Played it a few times recently on Mint and - other than the lack of competition - it's quite nice. Gameplay seems on par with the windows version, possibly better if you consider that it doesn't crap itself when alt-tabbing.
It's was released in late '09, so between 3-4 years old. It's also still one of the common games played at LAN parties etc
Sadly, we likely won't see a huge amount of the good old games ported, but with a lot of the newer engines being cross-platform I could see new stuff coming out available on 'nix.
Intel's Linux driver is now in the first place of the pole while Apple's OS X driver lost a few position after a problem with the carburetor during the last Malaysian Grand Prix.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
When your chosen platform can't do something, just redefine the goal and then hate on anyone who doesn't accept that definition. So any game I can't get on Linux is a "watt-sucking/heat-sink-busting" game? Well then count me in as wanting to play those! Of games I've played lately that don't run on Linux Skyrim has topped the list, 200 hours in it so far. It is an extremely entertaining game, I have gotten my money's worth and more out of it. Also on the list would be Xcom, Torchlight 2, Deus Ex, Fallen Enchantress, Shogun 2 Total War, Terraia and so on. Now if those are all "watt-sucking/heat-sink-busting" games according to you, fine, but I don't care I liked them, a lot, and want to play them. Crysis? Not on the list, I didn't care for it, so I haven't bought any of the sequels.
Frankly the measure of how good the platform is for gaming isn't how many games you can find for it, it is how many games that you want to play run on it. That'll vary person to person. However trying to point to a bunch of little indy or half-finished OSS titles isn't going to make many gamers happy. Sorry, but I want Skyrim, it is all kinds of worth it and not just for the graphics (though when yo uload up some mods those are pretty impressive too). I don't want Vega Strike.
Re: No, no, Slashdot is probably the pinnacle of the gender divide.
Having a physicist in my family, along with a female physician, I must protest your claim. The pinnacle of the gender divide is much more likely to be localized within the branches or tendrils of the hard sciences, engineering, or the sexism-bastion of medicine known as surgery:
1 - Physics: theoretical and condensed matter physics.
2 - Electrical Engineering
3 - Cardiothoracic Surgery
4 - Neurosurgery - may I strongly suggest reading the book "Walking Out on the Boys" by Frances Conley, M.D., a Stanford Neurosurgeon.
So ... you mean pretty much like it is now?
Apple also doesn't want to have its customers deal with the 'new driver a day' race between nVidia and ATI.
Point updates come often enough that its not actually a problem.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
...
As opposed to the open source kernel that OSX uses?
Or the kernel source for Windows that Intel has had access to for longer than it has been called Windows?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
From my experience, Intel graphics drivers on Mac OS X are not just slow. They also cause the machine to make noises (coil whine) for some reason, and also cause it to overheat a lot. They are truly horrible.