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22-Way SteamOS Graphics Card Comparison: NVIDIA Wins Across the Board (phoronix.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the competitor-is-steamed dept.

An anonymous reader writes: A 22-way AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce graphics card comparison on SteamOS 2.0 "Brewmaster" was carried out with one month to go until Steam Machines begin to ship. The article looks at the OpenGL performance of this Debian-based Linux distribution as well as the power/performance efficiency, thermal efficiency, and value of the entire line-up. The results make it pretty clear why the current range of Steam Machines with SteamOS all ship with NVIDIA graphics.

2 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. What else is new? by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    AMD has never been able to write OpenGL drivers worth a damn. I dunno why they have so much trouble, but it has been that way forever. Holds true on Windows too. nVidia cards run equal speed in DX and OpenGL on Windows, AMD cards run was faster in DX mode.

    Allegedly the open source drivers would fix it, however it turns out that programming graphics drivers is really hard, particularly when you can't use licensed code, and the drivers have not provided impressive features and performance yet.

    So, as ever, nVidia is the winner because their proprietary Linux drivers are just as fast as their proprietary Windows drivers which is to say damn fast.

  2. AMD is banking on DX12/Vulkan by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    . . . not OpenGL. Don't expect their OpenGL performance to improve much in the future.