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

Just so you know

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Just so you know

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not believe there are better Xorg drivers available in Linux, including NVidia.

The problem with the intel drivers is that no matter what settings I try all the video playback through emacs is CHOPPY AS HELL!. It's unreadable. The Xorg drivers from NVIdia at least can deinterlace without crashing, but they are still choppy. I'll wait for the Ubuntu version.

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:That's great news!

[Samantha Wright]

No, I'm pretty sure "depreciated" is right, since no ceasefire has been called. Think of it as a more tongue-in-cheek equivalent, along the lines of PHP deprecation, which actually means "popular."

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?