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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?
Did you know that you can run steam and source engine games on ubuntu now?
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
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'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but in case you aren't, I think you need a GPU with at least Pixel Shader 2.0 hardware in order to play it. anything bellow and it will crash the moment you open a portal. Unfortunately, no driver update can fix this problem.
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 popped open the Mac App Store and took a glance at the first page of games. Just to name a few that were listed, there's Borderlands 2, CoD: Black Ops, Batman: Arkham City, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Civ V, Bioshock, Amnesia, Witcher 2, Assassin's Creed II, and XCOM: Enemy Unknown. And if I pop open my copy of Steam, I can find pretty much all of Valve's titles, as well as a whole lot more. Granted, they're not all the latest and greatest (e.g. Bioshock, not Infinite; AC2, not AC3; Black Ops, not Black Ops II), but it's a wide selection of well-known games from a number of developers.
Jokes like yours are funniest when they use humor to take the edge off of a point that would otherwise be painful to swallow, but yours is simply off the mark entirely. Unreal, Source, Gamebryo, id Tech, IW, and Unity engines all work with OpenGL and have a number of games out using it. There are strong rumors that Crytek already has an in-house version of CryEngine 3 running with OpenGL, and based on job listings at DICE, it looks like they're porting their Frostbite engine over as well for use with Battlefield.
Given the disappointment that some of the major game developers have expressed (e.g. Gabe Newell's public statements) towards Windows 8, along with Microsoft's signals that DirectX may be at its end of life, is it really any surprise that all of the major game engines have already been ported or are in the process of being ported to OpenGL? Even more so when you consider that the two major smartphone OSes (i.e. the platforms on which most games today are now played) only make use of OpenGL? Not to mention that on gaming devices that support one or both of OpenGL or DirectX, all but one of those devices (Xbox) supports OpenGL in addition to or to the exclusion of DirectX? And the fact that Linux is quickly gaining recognition as a high-performance gaming platform and is getting some love from developers and publishers? Finally, is it really all of that surprising that the developers are actually making use of these game engines to put games on as many devices as possible?
Mind you, I'm not suggesting that DirectX should be abandoned, by any means, since it's still quite powerful and is still the library that's used on one of the major consoles out today. All I mean to do is point out the folly in your assertion that OpenGL is not being utilized in games.