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!

[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!

[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: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.