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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!) !!!
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.
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?
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
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.
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 ]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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