Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Testing 65 Different GPUs On Linux With Open Source Drivers

Posted by Soulskill on from the line-'em-up-and-knock-'em-down dept.

An anonymous reader writes "How good are open source graphics drivers in 2014 given all the Linux gaming and desktop attention? Phoronix has tested 65 different GPUs using the latest open source drivers covering Intel HD Graphics, NVIDIA GeForce, AMD Radeon, and AMD FirePro hardware. Of the 65 GPUs tested, only 50 of them had good enough open source driver support for running OpenGL games and benchmarks. Across the NVIDIA and AMD hardware were several pages of caveats with different driver issues encountered on Linux 3.15 and Mesa 10.3 loaded on Ubuntu 14.04. Intel graphics on Linux were reliable but slow while AMD's open-source Linux support was recommended over the NVIDIA support that doesn't currently allow for suitable graphics card re-clocking. Similar tests are now being done with the proprietary Linux drivers."

7 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Thankful for the FOSS drivers on older hardware by phorm · · Score: 4, Informative

    I recently updated my Mint install and discovered that the newer AMD/FGLRX drivers have a big issue with the backlight on various laptops (mainly, that they turn it off or down to zero).
    At first I thought I had no display, but later noticed that if there is some front-light I could vaguely see the login window.

    As it's an older model, it seems to get less attention from AMD (Nvidia is much the same). However, I was happy to see how much better the FOSS driver seems to work these days, so for now I'm back to using that. Backlight works, and video seems reasonably fast. I haven't tried any 3d/gaming yet but it will be interesting to see how that stacks up.

    1. Re:Thankful for the FOSS drivers on older hardware by jones_supa · · Score: 4, Informative

      My experience is that the open source Radeon driver has been getting much better in 3D performance lately.

  2. AMD Open Source by slacka · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I have an old Radeon X1950PRO in guest/spare PC. While it's getting long in the tooth it's still good enough for some Star Craft 2 and Dota 2 action with friends. Unfortunately I have to boot to windows 7 to get decent performance. The kernel devs are always changing the driver interface, so the last time I was able to use the proprietary drivers was around Ubuntu 6. Now in Linux my only option are buggy, glitch drivers like Phoronix described in their drivers or booting to Windows. The hardware specs were released. Now if after 8 year, the open source drivers are still buggy and slow, they will never be as good as the proprietary. What Linux needs a stable driver interface like Windows has.

    1. Re:AMD Open Source by Rockoon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What Linux needs a stable driver interface like Windows has.

      Windows does not have a stable driver interface. What windows does have is the market share necessary to not suffer too much when the interface changes.

      In any event its inexcusable in both cases to ever undergo more than 1 driver interface change per architecture. I get it.. at first you do something that works but later the design proves inadequate, so the second time around it should be designed right. Pick an ABI and stick with it, and design to be extensible.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    2. Re:AMD Open Source by Kjella · · Score: 4, Informative

      Windows does not have a stable driver interface. What windows does have is the market share necessary to not suffer too much when the interface changes.

      In recent history there was WDDM 1.0 (Vista, 2006) 1.1 (Win7, 2009) 1.2 (Win8, 2012) and 1.3 (Win8.1, 2013) and as far as I can tell they're backwards compatible - if your graphics card has a WDDM 1.0 driver you can still run Win8.1, however it'll also cap your DirectX level. Unless I'm mistaken that's 8 years of a stable (but expanding) ABI, it seems like DirectX 12 will require WDDM 2.0 which may be the next clean break but we won't know until Win9 is out. But I agree that the market share helps Microsoft a lot, particularly the market share of gamers despite Steam now being on Linux - according to their May 2014 survey 95.5% run Steam on Windows. Also for all those pointing to Distrowatch, at least 0.64% of the 1.10% running Linux use Ubuntu with only 0.08% verified as Mint...

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  3. Phoronix Rocks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I just wanted to say that Phoronix is an undervalued gem. These guys (I think just one guy actually) puts in the grunt work to get us hard performance numbers. He's developed a fully automated testing system that makes it easy to bisect kernel patches to identify the source of kernel regressions. I get the impression he runs on a shoestring budget out of his house but the work he does is the kind of thing that OS vendors of old used to dedicate entire teams too. He really ought to be fully funded by some group like the Linux Foundation because his work is invaluable in that nitty-gritty unsexy way that really helps out more visible engineering.

  4. Yes it does by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Informative

    Their interface is stable per version of Windows. They freeze the ABI and it is set until the next one. They don't change it much usually anyhow, Vista being a notable exception. Now of course when new DX features come out you have to update your drivers to support it if you want those features, but it isn't necessary to make your driver work, the old driver continues to work.

    It does not get updated with every kernel patch, ala Linux.