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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."
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.
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ATI blows equally. Intel is known to have a little better drivers but have software worts to encourage them to CPU bound for obvious reasons. Or was the case 6 years ago when I worked for a famous game company.
Windows 8/8.1 blows on Nvidia with the latest drivers if you do not have the latest cards. Ask any owner as the majority of the 8.1 update 1 failures were NVidia related.
My ATI 7850 also craps out requiring a re-image with any .4 drivers. 12.4 and 13.4 I avoid even though they are WHQ.
The situation with the graphics markers are like the ISPs with broadband or the major telecoms when picking a cell phone. Not a monopoloy but an oligopoly run by a few. Boy I miss PowerVR, S3, 3DFX Vodoo, and Matrox.
You can bet if they were still around competing toe to toe with Nvidia and ATI everyone would benefit regardless of which side you pick. To me I view them as picking AOL vs RealPlayer. Yuck.
For the record I was an nvidia fanboy at one time too before owning ATI cards.
http://saveie6.com/
NVIDIA definitely write their own OSX drivers. I'm pretty sure AMD/ATI and Intel write their own OSX drivers too but these days GPU drivers are usually delivered with operating system updates (in a similar way that you can get driver updates through Windows update). Given how squeezing out GPU hardware documentation for Linux has been tough I don't think NVIDIA/AMD would be keen to help someone else write drivers that unlocked full functionality...
Actually, it's microsoft that doesn't play well with much else. Since the driver development consists of closed and open teams, the openness of the code isn't the issue here (though it would be nice to have).
OT: "Geldreich" is a German compound of Money (Geld) and rich/plentyful (reich). So if he's called Rich Geldreich, that could be written as Rich Rich... Yeah, I know: no one knows Richie Rich today.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
There's a comment at the bottom of the article by David Poole that links to a post talking about OpenGL driver quality on desktop Linux and mobile Linux. The summary from that blog post is:
Boy I miss PowerVR, S3, 3DFX Vodoo, and Matrox.
I don't, having to code for OpenGL, Direct3D, Glide, Rendition and MSI to optimally support all the different vendors on the market was a huge PITA. Though I do agree that the competition was so fierce that technology was bounding forward at a brilliant pace! ...and that part I do miss.
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.
ATI is catching up and are competitive. NVidia lowered the price and made their Quadro turn into the Titan serious to counter the ATi 290x.
Good for consumers. However, their drivers are shit. ATI's drivers have improved then had issues again with frame pacing and mantle on older AMD chipsets. Nvidia had some questionable hardware and now worse drivers which are unstable and Windows 8/8.1 HATE. They do not even support all of directX 11.1 which is the cause of the crashes.
Part of me feels ATI and Nvidia are doing this on purpose so they can sell the remarked gamer cards as FirePRo's and Quadro's for real professional work yada yada at an expensive price. I mean if it is so bad even for 2d Adobe apps you need a $2,000 card just so video artificats do not pop up you know you have trouble.
Or maybe I am cynical to think of a conspiracy to sell professional grade cards more with real opengl of course.
http://saveie6.com/
The situation with the graphics markers are like the ISPs with broadband or the major telecoms when picking a cell phone. Not a monopoloy but an oligopoly run by a few. Boy I miss PowerVR, S3, 3DFX Vodoo, and Matrox.
Ask the people stuck with Poulsbo how they feel about PowerVR graphics, they are one of the few who suck worse than nVidia for driver support. 3DFX with their Glide API was king of proprietary solutions. S3 was the patent champion, even today their patented S3 Texture Compression causes trouble for open source. And Matrox made Intel's 3D performance look stellar. YMMV but I feel the competition in the graphics market is still working fairly well, at least a lot better than on the CPU side. It's just that the primary focus is who can push the most FPS in the latest games using the most bleeding edge drivers, that's what drives sales. But if you think it was any different back then, it's time to take off those rose colored glasses. The only thing that used to be really stable was Intel's server drivers, practically zero performance but it didn't bring your server down.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Really, considering the quality of drivers out of nvidia for the last year I'm glad I switched to ATI. I think it started around the nvidia 302.xx series, where the mass lockups began and the nvidia forums(before they were hacked) that had the 480k post thread with 1m+ views for TDR's. Then it was the crashing with firefox, that lasted from the 302's right up to the 320's. It only got worse about the time the 310's or 315's rolled around and the drivers were causing hardlocks across all 400,500,600 series cards. And I think it was right around the 308's where the complaints got so bad that nvidia was willing to pay shipping costs for anyone in the continental US to have their rigs sent to California so they could try to find out why the TDR problem was so rampant.
I haven't heard anything good on the state of nvidia drivers, if I have a complaint about ATI drivers is that some programs are bit more sluggish compared to my nvidia card, but I'll take the stability over the TDR, TDR, TDR, TDR, TDR, TDR. And sadly it wasn't one card(had a 400, and two 560 series cards), and one configuration, or even one power supply or a particular CPU in my case. It was across AMD, Intel, various ram speeds, paired, non-paired, different PSU's, and machines in more than one physical location.
My general policy has been to flip-flop every generation and go nvidia to ati and back again. But the last series of drivers pissed me off to no end that I dumped them for ATI, and Matrox didn't go anywhere they're still making video cards only on the business end though. The problem of course is much like the CPU business right? Remember the days of Cyrix, AMD, Intel? Well it was a case of hardware pushing so fast that not all of the companies could keep up. Same deal happened in the videocard market.
Om, nomnomnom...
"Windows 8/8.1 blows on Nvidia with the latest drivers if you do not have the latest cards. Ask any owner as the majority of the 8.1 update 1 failures were NVidia related."
I know it's an anecdote, but you said ask anyone, so hey, I have 8.1 update 1 and saw no failures with a not the latest card using the latest drivers. Not had the slightest problem, everything worked fine and smooth (well, apart from generally just being Windows 8 - but hey, I like to try before I judge).
A small correction, Nvidia Quadro has not "turned into the Titan". Quadro cards are largely the same hardware as the consumer cards, but with minor changes to enable certain features. The main difference is in the drivers. Consumer drivers err on the side of speed, whereas Quadro drivers will typically have lower performance in a game type situation, but be better suited for CAD / 3D work.
This is correct. We had more competition in terms of choosing graphics cards in the past, it didn't mean they were actually competitors or even tried to not do a completely shit job that didnt' help anyone in the long term.
Intel doesn't give a shit even today as far as graphics - good luck getting any launch game to run on any integrated graphics platform on a screen above 1024x768, where even a $50 card from literally anyone else will do better than the extra $50 intel is charging people to have an IGP. Hell, even AMD's hybrid solutions do better for gaming by an order of magnitude. What intel is open sourcing is not a solid 3d background, but a pile of unused 2d renders and basically nothing. It would not be unlike taking mono on linux and saying that Microsoft "gave up the crown jewels for linux" when it's explicitly untrue.
Meanwhile, AMD is budget constrained and not the best, Nvidia is proprietary as fuck (and tries to encourage everyone else to be, look at PhysX's bullshit proprietary nature), and Intel is shit. People don't build gaming rigs with an intel IGP in mind. Our options are just as relatively poor as they were back in the day, just newer hardware/better software.
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...
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