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Open-Source GPU Drivers Show Less Than Ideal Experience For SteamOS/Linux Gaming (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Phoronix's recent 22-Way SteamOS Graphics Card Comparison showed that NVIDIA wins across the board when it comes to closed-source OpenGL driver performance. However, when it comes to the open-source driver performance for Steam Linux gaming, no one is really the winner. A new article, "Are The Open-Source Graphics Drivers Good Enough For Steam Linux Gaming?" answers that question with "heck no" by its author. While AMD is generally regarded as having better open-source support, their newer graphics cards still can't run at their rated clock frequencies due to lack of power management support, the lack of enough OpenGL 4.x support means many AAA Linux games simply cannot run yet, not enough QA means regressions are common, and other issues were noted when it comes to testing a number of modern graphics cards on the open-source drivers.
I don't think Linux gamers or even people doing heavy 3D editing/animation feel a big need to have access to the source code for the graphics drivers. Maybe a VERY small percentage would prefer it, because they're knowledgeable enough of a coder to tweak a driver to fix a specific problem they're encountering? But that's got to be far less than 1% of the user-base.
I have little interest in hacking my own video drivers, but I would still very much prefer that they were open source. Because I want the very small percentage of users who would hack their own video drivers to be able to, so that I can benefit from their work. That's the beauty of open source, and it's the reason why we put up with all the considerable ugliness of open source.