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FreeBSD, Ubuntu Offer Same NVIDIA OpenGL Support As Windows
An anonymous reader writes "There's some good news if you use NVIDIA graphics on (Ubuntu) Linux or FreeBSD with their binary graphics driver: the OpenGL performance is comparable to Windows 8. Unfortunately, that's not the same for Intel graphics and AMD doesn't even offer a Catalyst driver for FreeBSD. FreeBSD offers a binary Linux compatibility layer to run games at the same (or better) performance as Linux, but unfortunately it's capped to running Linux x86 binaries and NVIDIA is the only GPU vendor with proper BSD graphics driver support."
AMD is missing out on that HUGE FreeBSD gaming market.
"...performance is comparable to Windows 8."
Oooh, this is going to get ugly, quick.
Then Nvidia continues to get my consumer dollars.
(Whew, that was easy...)
I see nothing new or surprising about this. But then again who uses FreeBSD. The proprietary Linux drivers have been that way for years.
This article seems to be talking about newer hardware and the NVIDIA binary blob driver. If you're stuck with Nouveau and an older NVIDIA card, your performance is going to be much worse than Windoze. I recently de-Windozed a P4 box running a GeForce440MX. Perfectly acceptable performance under XP became molasses-slow under Xubuntu 13 - we're talking seconds per screen refresh, and lots of visual artifacting. Newer distys and the legacy binary blob drivers that support GeForce 4 don't play nice with each other either. I ended up yanking the card and putting in a Radeon 9800SE (with 1/4 the video RAM) and even with the open-source radeon driver, performance was astronomically better - the machine was actually *useable*.
Unfortunately, that's not the same for Intel graphics and AMD doesn't even offer a Catalyst driver for FreeBSD.
I'm still trying to get the Tseng Labs ET4000 video chip in my IBM PS/2 ValuePoint to display more than 256colors. Apparently the chip itself is capable but there was a hardware bug in IBM's implementation (the chip is soldered to the motherboard, by the way) and it simply won't display 16 or 24bit color depths in Windows 3.1 without artifacting all-to-hell. I've tried calling IBM every year or so (since 1994) to see if they've released a patched BIOS for the problem yet but still no luck (however, now that Lenovo's in charge, things might finally shape up over there; my fingers're crossed...).
FreeBSD offers a binary Linux compatibility layer to run games at the same (or better) performance as Linux
Or worse. It might be worse, too.
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Both AMD and NVIDIA need to release the code if they are going to compete with Intel on GNU/Linux. Intel's graphics may not be as good performance wise although they just work and work well. In comparison NVIDIA and AMD are problematic. They require non-free drivers (yes- even AMD- some distributions can't include the driver because of a non-free component) and support sucks. You are guaranteed to lose support the second these companies discontinue it and history shows it will happen. Comparatively the Intel stuff is maintainable by the community and there isn't a guaranteed discontinuation date. As long as there is someone interested and willing to support it there will be support. I would never buy a system with NVIDIA or AMD graphics nor a card to go in one of my machines. And when I know support is going to end it doesn't matter if it is "great" now.
OpenGL on Windows is a second rate citizen.
FreeBSD plays games "as well or better" than Linux? On what criteria, the Phoronix benchmark which gave the FBSD and Ubuntu beta box different hardware?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
This is why http://ur1.ca/euny1
For once I couldn't agree more with him.
If I connect an Nvidia graphics card to a HDTV over HDMI from a system running Ubuntu 13.04, will it automatically output 1920x1080 with no underscan issues? AMD can't do that, so if Nvidia can then my next GPU will be an Nvidia one.
The time we get ASLR and other exploit countermeasures turned on by default including ports in FreeBSD ?
> proper BSD graphics driver support.
Perhaps it's only me, but considering it's multi-platform open source operating system, I wouldn't call X86/X86-64 only binary drivers "proper support"...
I'm not sure if I believe this. I thought OpenGL has to pass through layers-upon-layers of APIs (just like sound) to do anything. All of that overhead can't possibly translate well to the average Joe. Plus, as we all know, Linux hardware compatibility is usually Plug 'n' Pray (i.e. plug it in, pray it works OOB).