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."

Comments

That's great news!

[girlinatrainingbra]

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!) !!!

Re:That's great news!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Is there any reason to suspect that Intel is withholding any assistance that Apple is requesting?

Since they are actively working on an OSS driver, they clearly don't have some sort of 'zOMG Intellectual Secrets!!!' concern(and it's not as though Apple would be averse to signing the NDAs in any case), and Apple buys a lot of Intel chips(including a pretty good mix of the higher margin ones. They don't move Xeons for shit; but they also don't ship anything lower-end than an i5. That's not the sort of customer you play petty little games with when it comes to engineering support.

Re:That's great news!

[Progman3K]

Honestly, I love the fact that linux is not mainstream on the desktop yet.

I live my (computing) life blissfully, untroubled by the rolling waves of forced upgrades and virus panics that everyone around is going through and I can just smile and say "sorry, I run linux, I have no idea how to fix that" when they ask me to help them with their mess.

I truly hope linux NEVER becomes mainstream.

Re:That's great news!

[Samantha Wright]

Exception? No, no, Slashdot is probably the pinnacle of the gender divide. I can count the number of (confessed) estrogen-infused users on here on two hands. Even 4chan is less homogeneous, despite the... rich tradition of unrestrained abuse to every imaginable target. The popularity curve moved along a long time ago; I don't think it's wrong to say the average Slashdot user has more in common with Timothy Lord than Homo starbucksii—one need only look to the voices that pipe up during the numerous "IT wages gripefest" stories. These be a more slovenly, disenfranchised folk.

Admittedly, I haven't experienced much in the way of childish moderation (which, honestly, seems to know no gender boundaries), but I do usually try to keep my pointless little self-validating karma-farming operation on the downlow, and most posts end up informational. But hey, on the bright side, I bet you've gotten fewer creepy marriage proposals through here than I have. And there's always the mysterious anonymous butt pirate, but given the rate of such posts I'm starting to wonder if there's only one guy in the entire world who does that, sort of like Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged.

Re:That's great news!

[TENTH SHOW JAM]

My phone runs Linux. My tablet runs Linux. My netbook runs linux. My Set top box runs linux. My Entertainment Computer runs linux. All by default out of the box. My Email server/Social network/offsite backup solution runs linux. I do keep a Win7 box handy, but even that has a Linux partition.

No CompileKernel WorkOutDependancies nonsense. The only reason I know this (besides being a geek) is by digging in the "About This Device" thingy and reading the kernel version.

When do you think Linux will become mainstream?

Re:That's great news!

[serviscope_minor]

When do you think Linux will become mainstream?

Ah and this is where Stallman was right (damn him). Replace the OP's comment with GNU/Linux. Then it all makes sense.

Personally, I love my GNU/Linux desktop. It is by hackers for hackers and I love it that way. If it becomes mainstream then it will not be what I want since for hackers is never going to be mainstream. I'm happy with that.

I have no particular desire for it to be exclusive and that is not a goal of mine. I do have a desire for it to be hacker friendly and I accept that that will not be a mainstream thing.

Re:That's great news!

[Samantha Wright]

Well... so far it's been +4 Funny, +2 Insightful, -1 Offtopic, but we can hope.

why is this news?

[anthony_greer]

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?

Re:why is this news?

[danbob999]

No mater who makes it, in the end, you are getting more performance on Linux than on OS X. Unless you can download a better performing driver for OS X, this is an argument for using Linux.

Re:why is this news?

[flimflammer]

...Really? You're making a tremendous leap to that conclusion. You think ultimately slight performance gains in OpenGL over another OS is enough to convince all the software developers out there to switch to Linux? Just because OpenGL performs a little better? Are you honestly that daft?

Re:Great!

[Hes Nikke]

Did you know that you can run steam and source engine games on ubuntu now?

Bad citizen

[DrYak]

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.

Re:Bad citizen

[Kjella]

Except the open source community doesn't take "no" for an answer, it's like calling a hermit a bad citizen simply because he wants nothing to with the rest of society. Those technologies you talk of won't work with a blob because there's no ABI and GPL hooks, so it essentially boils down to the same: nVidia doesn't do open source. They only want to offer you the blob, period. But for a lot of people in the OSS community it seems doing nothing at all is the same as being evil. Either you're with us, or you're against us.

Just a bit of perspective...

[gnasher719]

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.