FreeBSD, Ubuntu Offer Same NVIDIA OpenGL Support As Windows

Posted by timothy on Thursday August 1, 2013 @12:44AM from the next-year-windows-will-be-ready-for-the-desktop dept.

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."

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Re:AMD Shooting themselves in the foot by Anonymous Coward · 2013-08-01 01:13 · Score: 5, Insightful

I'm not a FreeBSD user, but this shows that sadly, we still have a long way to go when it comes to getting open source driver support. Sure, there are drivers for Linux nowadays, which I'll admit is a huge victory in itself. But having binary drivers only completely misses the point. The point of *open* drivers is to permit tinkering, which is a Greater Good that benefits all of us (including the manufacturer).