Intel Linux Driver Now Nearly As Fast As Windows OpenGL Driver

An anonymous reader writes "Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver is now running neck-and-neck with the Windows 8.1 driver for OpenGL performance between the competing platforms when using the latest drivers for each platform. The NVIDIA driver has long been able to run at similar speeds between Windows and Linux given the common code-base, but the Intel Linux driver is completely separate from their Windows driver due to being open-source and complying with the Linux DRM and Mesa infrastructure. The Intel Linux driver is still trailing the Windows OpenGL driver in supporting OpenGL4."

Comments

woo

[nomadic]

This should convince anyone that open source linux software can compete with windows, given 22 years.

Re:woo

[epyT-R]

This has little to do with the architecture and mostly to do with vendor support. This has always been a problem for non-windows OSes. Even apple's opengl isn't exactly the best in terms of performance. Linux easily outperforms it when using nvidia's driver.

Re: woo

[tysonedwards]

Microsoft blew its right foot off with Windows 8.
They went to the doctor to get it reattached with Windows 8.1 only to wake up to find out that a second left foot was attached in place.

Re: woo

[ericloewe]

Let's hope they get their right left foot replaced with a right foot in Windows 8.2.

Re: woo

[TheGratefulNet]

maybe windows 8.11, 'windows for podgroups'. not sure if that's an official project name or not...

Re: woo

[EMN13]

unless, of course, you count phones...

Re: woo

[jones_supa]

Let's hope they get their right left foot replaced with a right foot in Windows 8.2.

There are some interesting rumors that 8.2 would actually bring the Start Menu back. Those might not mean anything of course, but it's nice to dream.

Re: woo

[rvw]

Let's hope they get their right left foot replaced with a right foot in Windows 8.2.

You mean they should replace the right left foot with the left right foot?

Re: woo

[Anonymous Coward]

And server, and mainframes and embedded devices.

Re: woo

[Hamsterdan]

Microsoft is probably the only company able to make so many mistakes & blunders without going out of business (thanks to their hold on the corporate market & large cash reserves).

MS Bob, Clippy, ME, Zune, Windows phone, Vista, Win RT, Win 8. Let's see what someone else than Ballmer will be able to do.

Re: woo

[davydagger]

thats actually not true, unless you count desktop computers as the only type of computers.

As in number of installs, linux dominates world wide as the most installed OS peroid.(includes android). It dominates in the supercomputer, phone, server markets, and it makes a sizable presence in the Mainframe, realtime, and embedded markets.

Compare with windows, which has desktops on lockdown, has a small presence serverside, and virtually non-existant, and viewed as some form of sick joke, elsewhere.

Re: woo

[mewsenews]

How does microsoft do so much user testing and have no idea these products are going to be colossal flops?

I can't imagine the reasoning that went on behind the push for Windows 8:

"Let's unify our mobile and desktop interfaces, because we have a stranglehold on the desktop, people will gravitate towards our mobile offerings"

The public responds "we hate this" and they choose to do it anyway? Don't they do focus groups? Didn't they anticipate that people are disgusted by a touch interface on their keyboard+mouse system?

I'm fascinated and horrified but I'm also pleased because I am not fond of Microsoft, but what the hell do they think they are doing?

Re: woo

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Microsoft blew its right foot off with Windows 8. They went to the doctor to get it reattached with Windows 8.1 only to wake up to find out that a second left foot was attached in place.

Unfortunately, Win7's dual-left-foot support was actually pretty good; but was removed because you can't operate the imaginary ipad-killing tablet that Balmer dreams about with two left feet...

That's the weird thing about Win8: Vista, while a failure, at least had the decency to founder largely because everything kept from XP was antique and everything scrapped and rebuilt was immature. Win8 started out as a product that people (at least the Windows-using ones) mostly liked, and then was systematically mutilated until the release date. That takes talent.

Re: woo

[0123456]

I'm fascinated and horrified but I'm also pleased because I am not fond of Microsoft, but what the hell do they think they are doing?

Surviving. They don't believe the desktop will exist in a few years, so owning it won't matter.

Of course, if you go out of your way to destroy desktop Windows in pursuit of tablet market share, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Re: woo

[ultranova]

How does microsoft do so much user testing and have no idea these products are going to be colossal flops?

They knew, they simply ignored that and went with wistful thinking instead.

I guess it's not any easier admitting you're past your prime for corporations than it's for humans...

Re:woo

[JabberWokky]

It turned out to be "The Year of the Linux Smartphone", and it happened already. Also DVR and similar devices.

Re: woo

[real-modo]

Ah. Every few years, a new bunch of people need to read "Worse Is Better".

Re: woo

[Zemran]

Linux is not crap on the desktop in any way, it is crap as a games platform. Not everyone (OK the majority but still not everyone) wants to play games all the time. Some people actually want to have a reliable work platform and for that, Windows is crap.

Re: woo

[jthill]

People don't know what they want until you show it to them, and Microsoft's marketers can't imagine what that could mean beyond anything they show people, people can be made to want.

Re: woo

[Rob Y.]

They don't care if it 'fails'. After a year or two and the fuss starts dying down, machines start breaking and needing to be replaced, and voila - the desktop monopoly kicks in, and windows 8.whatever is a smashing success (regardless of how many users want to smash their computers). Meanwhile, Windows Phone garners whatever market share it can manage based on a trickle of developers starting to code to the Metro UI. May not be enough to make WP a success, but without it, WP would've been a complete non-starter. None of which did Nokia any good, but Microsoft could care less about Nokia's collapse. They can afford to operate on a longer time frame, and if their partners can't, well that's not their problem.

For what it's worth, my company just bought Surface Pro's for all the sales force. Mostly as party favors handed out at a big 'how much money can we waste in one week' resort conference. But interestingly, management has taken an 'all our future products need to be cloud based' stance. And they still gave out Surfaces. To be fair, I guess, the Surface can probably run cloud stuff as well as any other tablet OS. In any case, it appears the corporate stranglehold may be starting to work its magic in the 'business mobile' arena...

Re:woo

[nomadic]

I used to swing back and forth between Windows and Linux, but honestly the past few years it's been all Windows. Windows 7 and Windows 8 are actually decent OSes, plus they run the software I need and the games and media that I want.

Intel

[Frosty Piss]

Someone smells a game plaform....

Re:Intel

[gl4ss]

oh they've been wanting to get into the game for a loong time now. pick any time between this and 10 years ago and they've always been one year from releasing a chip that could compete with atiamd/nvidia.

Re:Intel

[binarylarry]

True although look at the game console situations. In past generations the consoles used some PowerPC variant from IBM.

This time they're using x86 but not Intel. Intel has made a mint off the PC platform and now Valve is going to PCize the game console industry with SteamOS.

What do you think Intel's next move is going to be? What did they do when Microsoft did this to the PC market?

Re:Intel

[beelsebob]

Bear in mind that today's 5000 series actually does compete pretty bloody well with nVidia and AMD. It's near impossible to get a faster GPU in a thin and light laptop. The GeForce 740m is the same speed as it, the 750m is getting into power brackets that can't be put in a thin and light, and is only about 10-20% faster than the 5200 pro.

For me, Intel is doing a pretty impressive job of catching up. We've gone from intel being no where in terms of GPU performance to being able to equal the best nVidia and AMD can do at least in the power constrained market.

Re:Intel

[binarylarry]

We're also hitting diminishing returns with game graphics. It used to be generational differences between games was huge but these days can you really tell the different between this years shooter and last years shooter?

Barely.

Re:Intel

[something_wicked_thi]

I think you haven't been paying attention.

Take a look at this AnandTech review for one example.

Intel has been making great strides in GPU performance, especially for notebooks. This is probably primarily driven by Apple, but if you ignore the 4x MSAA problems, it's quite competitive with an nVidia 650m. And I've heard they're working on some pretty big improvements in Skylake.

Technologies like Crystalwell, and the amount of die space Intel is committing to this these days, make Intel a much more credible competitor for AMD and nVidia. Intel isn't going to unseat nVidia and AMD's dedicated graphics from the high-end gaming throne any time soon, but they're clearly angling for the mid-range market now whereas before, they were only after the lower end market. And given their significant power and thermal advantages, they've already got a pretty compelling offering.

Re:Intel

[mrbluze]

We're also hitting diminishing returns with game graphics. It used to be generational differences between games was huge but these days can you really tell the different between this years shooter and last years shooter?

Barely.

You mean they might actually start to give a toss about playability?

Re:Intel

[Ardyvee]

For the trained eye? Sure. For the masses? No. The difference we'll see will be mostly in the little details (hair/fur, clothing [maybe we'll finally get clothing that actually behaves like clothing instead of a mesh on all characters], reflections and just generally better lighting, non-shitty water [it's coming, it's coming!], and just maybe we'll stop using sprites for beams and related) , and the amount of things in the scene (and their detail).

Re:Intel

[ericloewe]

New console generation just arrived. It'll take at least a year for that leap to happen, or more, depending on the support the 360 and PS3 get from developers from now on.

Re:Intel

[epyT-R]

Sure, but if you're even remotely into gaming, you're not going to want a superthin machine because you can't get decent performance from them. There's also an issue of driver breakage. I won't even touch radeons for that reason, and Intel's drivers are even more broken. Intel gpus are 'ok' in a pinch, if the game is flexible enough (ie a quick impromptu deathmatch at the office after work), but I would never consider them viable for gaming, CAD, or other 3D graphics design work.

The whole premise of the comment I replied to was that intel was eyeballing linux as a gaming platform. They don't even target windows as a gaming platform. Their focus has always been 'just enough to run a composited desktop without too much lag.' They appear to compete better because, until recently, games have been held back by the 2005 era gpu technology in the consoles.

That said I am glad their drivers are reaching parity. This is good news for all those people who do use these gpus..and a lot of people do use them.

Re:Intel

[gl4ss]

uhm the graphics are the only thing you can tell are different. game engine gameplaywise being pretty much the same. a big problem having been though that due to consoles the models have stayed at same detail level for ages.

we're not at diminishing returns in that regard yet though, plenty of graphical improvement could be done with double the power...

Re:Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

How come 740 = 62010 and intel 5000 = 38976.

Higher is better in that bench.

Re:Intel

[epyT-R]

For me, the big one is texture resolution.. on the 360/ps3, they use a ton of post processing effects to cover up the low polycount models and low resolution textures. They give a 'wow' component the way those tvs at bestbuy do when theyr'e all set to 'vivid' mode.

Re:Intel

[epyT-R]

We'll see what happens when games are no longer saddled by 2005 era gpu technology. When that happens, I suspect the gap between intel's best gpus and nvidias/amd's midrange will widen considerably. You can see this is already apparent in the graphs of that anandtech article. As rendering demands go up, the gap widens. Intel's integrated gpus just won't have the vram bandwidth that the dedicated cards provide, nevermind the raw fillrate. This is because of limited die real estate and power draw requirements compared with those discrete gpu competitors.

Have they gotten better? Of course. They're miles ahead of their old GMA9xx crapola..

Re:Intel

[0123456]

We're also hitting diminishing returns with game graphics.

That's because most games are designed for consoles with the processing power of a five-year-old PC.

Re:Intel

[bobwalt]

I see someone had an axe to grind

Re:Intel

[DarkOx]

Intel my be looking at Linux as a "second tier" gaming platform. Steam may very well end up like the Netflix Streaming of video games, and Intel might be happy to have their CPU/GPU package in a low end Steam box.

My bet, and Steam as well as GOG are already showing this is there pretty good market for back catalog titles if you price them cheaply enough and make it super easy customers to purchase/install/play. That includes curating a catalog that will run on inexpensive modest hardware. You can also keep costs down not paying the Windows tax if you can make GNU/Lunux/Wine transparent to the user and work properly.

This is all gravy as far as the publishers are concerned. They are not generating any revenue off five+ year old titles otherwise if they grab additional revenue off their past work why would they pass it up. I don't think they risk cannibalizing their new release AAA catalog either if anything they will cannibalize the used market they don't seem to much care for anyway. So they will be on board.

Intel will be there to sell the chips, which Intel might be able to produce in their second class fabs rather than leasing them out again squeezing a little more revenue from prior investments.

Re:Intel

[Bert64]

Just as it was for the first gen xbox...

Components which are the same on every console, giving developers the chance to bypass any driver layers and program the hardware directly in order to get better performance from it.

Re:Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but they have bug that has been there since 2010 that has not been resolved and cause the gpu to lock up and you have to reboot to get it running again

Is that why you left out all punctuation? Trying to finish typing before your computer crashes again?

Re:Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

Punctuation is what triggers the bug!!!

Re:Intel

[Bengie]

Geometry calculations scale with the cube of the number of polygons. Non-ray-tracing engine's days are numbers and ray-tracing is soon(tm). Ray tracing is O(1 K), where K is large, current engines are O(n^3 K) where K is small. N is becoming an issue.

Re:Intel

[mikael]

That includes effects like ambient occlusion (+16 rays), shadowing (+1 ray per light source, maybe more for soft shadows)? The advertising industry already use real-time ray-tracing systems (with a render farm in a back room), so it's only a matter of time before that technology gets squashed into the space of a console.

Re:Intel

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I got some bad news for ya, these new Consoles don't have any custom hardware like past times. It's all standard PC components now for the PS4 and Xbone.

Not terribly relevant: regardless of what consoles are made of, the broad outlines of what games are going to look like generally depends on what is within shooting distance for doing a console port for. There may or may not be some improvements in the PC version, if yours can handle it (Skyrim HQ textures pack, support for higher-than-TV resolutions, etc.); but if serious surgery to the game is required to get it working on a console, that is a major limiting factor.

Honestly, more than any change in graphical power, I'm looking forward to seeing what having consoles with non-ridiculous amounts of RAM does for us. Even on games where the prettiness levels adjusted nicely to additional power, it was always a bit ridiculous sitting on 16GB of RAM (plus basically as much HDD space as the game wants, for state details where mediocre access speed is OK) and playing games that scrimped to ensure that all game-critical assets and state would fit in the half gig and shared with the GPU arrangement on the last generation of consoles. That's the sort of thing that makes games, even good looking ones, eerily sparse.

Re:Intel

[Miamicanes]

> We're also hitting diminishing returns with game graphics.

No, we're just temporarily semi-stalled on a plateau waiting for realtime hardware-accelerated ray tracing to commercially arrive.

Re:Intel

[chmod a x mojo]

HD4000 in my i5 runs FF14 at the lower range of the highest settings damn near 30FPS, an thats with PhysX at the highest settings for both characters and NPCs, @ 1366x768. I could easily get 40+ FPS by dropping quality down to medium / medium low, but it wouldn't look near as nice, and it is more than smooth enough as it stands.

Not too shabby for a non-gaming intended laptop, especially when ATI / AMD has bitten everyone in the ass with their "equivalent" laptop GPUs that shit the bed and couldn't run anywhere near what the the same gen desktop boards did.

Well supposedly X is old and busted.

[Anonymous Coward]

So how come the new hotness of the Windows video system is only as good as this apparently old and knackered XWindows system, how does that reflect on Windows?

Re:Well supposedly X is old and busted.

[Guy Harris]

So how come the new hotness of the Windows video system is only as good as this apparently old and knackered XWindows system

Did the tests in question go through the X server, or were they rendering images by directly talking to the graphics hardware and largely bypassing the X server, using the X server mainly for 2D stuff?

Thank you Gabe Newell

[Dega704]

Hence why even non-gamers were so excited about Valve's gambit. Even with the few games released so far, it has brought tons of much-needed development effort to the areas GNU/Linux was lacking in. Imagine how things will be if SteamOS & Co. succeed and it becomes a major gaming platform. Free software purist or not, everyone is going to benefit.

Re:Thank you Gabe Newell

[jones_supa]

Pah! Intel has already a steady history of making very good Linux display drivers. The Intel GMA hardware has had more featureful Linux OpenGL support for a long time when compared to other platforms. For example, the GMA X3100 (GM965 chipset) has OpenGL 1.5 support under Windows and OS X, but OpenGL 2.1 support under Linux.

Re:Thank you Gabe Newell

[TheRealMindChild]

Awsome! :-|

So you get to choose between 10 year old and 7 year old OpenGL implementations... doubleyou-tee-eff

Re:Thank you Gabe Newell

[jones_supa]

The situation is equally good in the newer Intel HD Graphics department.

Re:Thank you Gabe Newell

[nateman1352]

I'm just as happy as very other Linux user out there about the Intel drivers starting to get competitive... but I'm pretty sure the reason Intel's management is dropping big bucks on Linux graphics driver development is Andriod not SteamOS. SteamOS is probably a pleasant nice to have they they get without any large amount of extra investment.

Re:Linux DRM

[Guy Harris]

This is the problem with using DRM and other 3-letter acronyms in the article body; they become quite ambiguous.

Yup. Direct Rendering Manager, not Digital Rights Management.

(Having worked on Server Message Block protocol implementations, seeing "SMB" stand for "Small and Medium Businesses" gives my brain heartburn. :-))

Re:Linux DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager

Re:Another good step...

[binarylarry]

Yep, to stay relevant Microsoft will need someone extremely talented.

If they choose an Elop, they're doomed. Which is the scenario I'm hoping for.

Re:What about for non-curernt hardware?

[jones_supa]

You probably mean 4500MHD if it's a laptop. Anyway, the Linux driver for 4500MHD should play any kind of video without breaking a sweat. I would inspect the video player and compositor to see if they perform badly. Sadly, tearing is still something you meet way too often in Linux world. I have found out that Compiz (slow) and Compton are the ones that do not tear. Mutter can also be configured tear-free by putting this into /etc/environment: "CLUTTER_PAINT=disable-clipped-redraws:disable-culling".

Re:Linux DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it clearly means Super Mario Bros.

Re:What about for non-curernt hardware?

[DMJC]

Actually yes you will see a benefit. Every driver revision brings new OpenGL features which the older hardware supports. So if your card can render OpenGL 4.1 in Windows then it will eventually render OpenGL 4.1 on Linux. Optimisations that speed up the overall implementation of OpenGL apply to all generations of cards as long as they are non-hardware specific optimisations.

Windows desktop isn't all maximized all the time

[tepples]

Unless I count devices that can't show more than one window at once. Phones can't, and I accept that because of the 4-5" screen. But why can't I run two phone-sized apps side-by-side on my Nexus 7 tablet? Windows has supported showing two apps side-by-side ("Tile Vertically") since I started using Windows in the Windows 3.1 era, and it got even easier with "Snap" in Windows 7. Even Windows 8's often-ridiculed "modern UI" allows snapping a Windows Store app to a vertical column as wide as a phone's display.

AMD Mantle

[tepples]

The same bypass is coming to PCs with AMD Mantle. I wonder what Intel has up its sleeve to compete with Mantle.

Classic Shell is a prosthetic foot

[tepples]

I'd suggest attaching a different foot, but I don't know how mature that is. So I'll just name-drop the prosthetic I use on a Windows 8 PC at work: Classic Shell.

Re:Linux DRM

[Guy Harris]

You mean kind of like POS. Point of Sale. Geeez! What were you thinking of?

Even better - what was NCR thinking of?

NOT neck and neck

[Sits]

The headline is bad/misleading - many of those benchmarks are showing a disparity of more than 10% between the drivers. Using the numbers from the Phoronix article, Linux results are the highest number from any Linux driver (there are many cases where the most recent driver was not the best) to try and prove headline:

Linux = [35.88, 140.90, 43.37, 23.5, 32.23, 19.17, 25.17, 16.68, 99.24, 63.94, 46.80, 29.46]
Windows = [41.47, 162.88, 36.57, 27.0, 31.46, 19.37, 24.47, 16.85, 104.04, 65.15, 55.05, 36.63]
for i in range(len(Linux)):
  diff = abs(round((1 - Linux[i]/Windows[i])*100, 1))
  "Windows win by %d.1%%" % (diff) if Linux[i] < Windows[i] else "Linux . win by %d.1%%" % (diff)

'Windows win by 13.1%'
'Windows win by 13.1%'
'Linux . win by 18.1%'
'Windows win by 13.1%'
'Linux . win by 2.1%'
'Windows win by 1.1%'
'Linux . win by 2.1%'
'Windows win by 1.1%'
'Windows win by 4.1%'
'Windows win by 1.1%'
'Windows win by 15.1%'
'Windows win by 19.1%'

So out of 12 results, 5 showed a 10%+ difference between Linux and Windows Intel drivers in favour of Windows and 1 showed a 10%+ difference in favour of Linux. The conclusion that the drivers are neck and neck does not follow from the premise for around 40% of the results and that's when being unfairly generous to Linux!

Re:NOT neck and neck

[Lennie]

Sure, but did you also see this ?:

"The Windows driver also had much larger spikes in the frame latency than the Intel Linux driver."

http://openbenchmarking.org/embed.php?i=1311280-SO-INTELWIN869&sha=869d65c&p=2

Do you remember the days when Linux didn't perform well in this area ?

Re:Another good step...

[Lennie]

You probably want LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice.

Are you 12 years old?

[thatkid_2002]

I don't think there exists a single pro gamer that uses Intel graphics hardware. The Nvidia driver on Linux is more than adequate - and considering AMD/ATi's drivers are crap on Windows it's hard to produce any meaningful comment on that area. Also, if Direct X is so essential and magical then why don't consoles use it?

Re: Bad graph makes conclusions difficult

[Sits]

The Windows driver also had much larger spikes in the frame latency than the Intel Linux driver.

That sounds true looking at the summary statistics of the graph but the question is at what frequency and by how much when compared to Linux on the same frames? We know the Linux statistics have at least one peak (of 45) but none are visible on that graph because the Windows values have been drawn over the top of of the other values. It's a bad visualisation of the data and it's hard to learn all that much from it...

Do you remember the days when Linux didn't perform well in this area ?

In all honesty I don't (I remember tearing being more common which is a slightly different issue) which isn't to say it wasn't the case - I'd be grateful for sources which show what it used to be and what it is now with the same hardware. From what little I know, being able to measure OpenGL frame latency has only been possible for a few years on Linux...

Don't be silly! MS mangle their own market share??

[daboochmeister]

Of course, if you go out of your way to destroy desktop Windows in pursuit of tablet market share, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

NO executive management with the high-quality management training that is standard within MS would do anything at all like make statements to destroy the market share of their current market-leading product line! Isn't that called the Ratner Effect? The only thing even comparable would be for someone to fall prey to the Osborne Effect, and of course no one with a background in management at Microsoft would ever ... oh wait a minute ...