The Truth About OpenGL Driver Quality

rcht148 (2872453) writes "Rich Geldreich (game/graphics programmer) has made a blog post on the quality of different OpenGL Drivers. Using anonymous titles (Vendor A: Nvidia; Vendor B: AMD; Vendor C: Intel), he plots the landscape of game development using OpenGL. Vendor A, jovially known as 'Graphics Mafia' concentrates heavily on performance but won't share its specifications, thus blocking any open source driver implementations as much as possible. Vendor B has the most flaky drivers. They have good technical know-how on OpenGL but due to an extremely small team (money woes), they have shoddy drivers. Vendor C is extremely rich. It had not taken graphics seriously until a few years ago. They support open source specifications/drivers wholeheartedly but it will be few years before their drivers come to par with market standards. He concludes that using OpenGL is extremely difficult and without the blessings of these vendors, it's nearly impossible to ship a major gaming title."

Comments

Just bought a GTX 660....

[rsilvergun]

wanted an ATI card. Better performance and Image Quality for less money, but I just don't have time to be screwing around with making games work :(. I miss the hey-day of my 1650. $90 bucks, rock solid stable and fast. Just couldn't keep up.

Re:Just bought a GTX 660....

[epyT-R]

Try doing anything with radeon cards that the installed drivers were not 'optimized' (ie hacked together to get working) for and watch your $500 graphics card fail horribly.
eg:
1. Older games (not just ancient, but only a few years ago).
2. demoscene - most demos have trouble with radeon or ship with radeon specific binaries.
3. gpu accelerated desktop applications, 3d design, video editors, CAD, etc. you could argue that one should only use these programs with the 'professional' model cards, but these models share the same driver code with few modifications. The only difference is that they hide the bugs with stupid certification statements like "Only use driver 4.0.456.456.22 with autocad 15.4. While nvidia drivers have issues too, by and large, it's possible to run these applications quite acceptably on the 'gamer' class cards (which are software restricted in the driver) anyway. This is great for the gamer who wants to dabble in other things.

Maybe opengl needs a reworking.. the whole point of an api is to insulate the programmer from the differences in the hardware.

Re:Fuck the grafix mafia

[Wonko the Sane]

It's about time for someone to host a Github clone as a Tor hidden service for the explicit purpose of allowing people to share source code without having to worry about being punished by the imaginary property police.

Re:Nvidia blows too with drivers

[Assmasher]

Indeed.

I really DO NOT miss D3D execute buffers. Glide was awesome, and OpenGL 1.2 on IRIX was joyful (if the OS didn't crash on you...)

I remember coming into work one day and my dev manager saying the equivalent of "sorry about your office, but NASA is having trouble with their IR2 at Moffet so we got SGI to lend us one for a few weeks..." and lo and behold next to my desk was a brand spanking new - still had packing materials stuck to it - Onyx IR2 sitting there in all its purple glory. That was my favorite work day ever. This was one of those times when you actually say to yourself "they're paying ME to do this?"

I spent the next week working on multi-pipe multi-process OpenGL issues. Pure nerdgasm...

Those really were the great days of 3D in my opinion. Every week somebody was doing something awesome.

SPEA Fireboards, E&S graphics generators, Lockheed's Real3D, this crazy Hitachi Spherix that sat in my office for months.

DAMN! Nostalgia...