Slashdot Mirror
How OpenGL Graphics Card Performance Has Evolved Over 10 Years (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A new report at Phoronix looks at the OpenGL performance of 27 graphics cards from the GeForce 8 through GeForce 900 series. Various Ubuntu OpenGL games were tested on these graphics cards dating back to 2006, focusing on raw performance and power efficiency. From oldest to newest, there was a 72x increase in performance-per-Watt, and a 100x increase in raw performance. The NVIDIA Linux results arrive after doing a similar AMD comparison from R600 graphics cards through the R9 Fury. However, that analysis found that for many of the older graphics cards, their open-source driver support regressed into an unworkable state. For the cards that did work, the performance gains were not nearly as significant over time.
Can you just go away. People like you that make dumb comments like this add nothing to the discussion. Avoid the article and move on.
Linux has much less overhead and is often tailored to squeeze every ounce of power out of it's hardware. MS is a little more loose in that it will cater to as much hardware as possible at the cost of performance.
Linux if built for specific hardware can achieve much better performance than Windows in it's current state. I say current state because Xbox is an example where Windows could be optimized to perform for specific software hence avoid all the extra validation that eats up the hardware.
Linux is just not very good for games. Windows has much better technology when it comes to computer graphics
Linux is weaker because its a *relatively* unpredictable platform to target by comparison to windows, and crucial driver performance optimizations lag behind, or simply aren't done by the vendors; due to the relative demand/marketshare and that fact that companies have limited resources..
this is why the xbox is based on windows technology
That's mostly because the xbox is made by microsoft.
and not free hand-me-down college project stuff.
PS4 Orbis is based on FreeBSD. (Remember what the B in BSD stands for? Hint... think 'names of colleges'.)
Troll grade: FAIL
Avoid the article
It's really pretty interesting. We'll worth your time.
Driver support is among the worst of all hardware in all of Lignux. Always has been. OpenGL is still a hack bolt on to many GUI toolkits. Horrible confusion reigns with Wayland and X. OpenGL should be the foundation of screen rendering, period.
Comments like this is why I visit /. less often nowadays.
That might have been true 10 years ago, but at this point I doubt it.
Note that is nearly perfect 2x performance increase in 18 months
That must mean BSD is a really great platform for gaming?
I will download it now and hopefully get a few more FPS out of Fallout 4.
Oh wait you mean Sony used an open source bootloader to bootstrap their proprietary drivers and APIs, and that there really is no open source magic secret sauce that makes gaming worth anyones time?
Windows 10 is 10/10
Which part?
The study should have been called "measuring bit rot in open source drivers".
Linux may be more effcient, but OpenGL really isn't. Not from a development perspective. The big push to DirectX happened because OpenGL was just a royal pain in the ass to develop with. Where as DirectX is fully documented and has a massive support community, OpenGL is a lot like the wild west. You may have some documentation, but there's no central repository of knowledge for troubleshooting and assistance. Plus the state of graphics drivers under Linux makes it an extra special brand of hell for anyone porting a game over to it.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
All of it. Most performance improvements are in the driver side, and drivers for Windows are more performant than Linux versions in general. Windows isn't as bloated as it used to be. The fact that you can run Windows 10 on a 2GB tablet with pretty good performance is a testament to this. You should choose Linux because it is Open, not for performance reasons.
Linux is bloated and hacked. That's why FreeBSD is chosen for all professional projects that require high-performance graphics, such as OS X and PlayStation 4.
Not really that interesting.
Summary: Older video cards are slower than newer video cards, but linux still a piece of shit.
The big push to DirectX happened because OpenGL was just a royal pain in the ass to develop with.
Not quite. OpenGL was an alterative to the software rendering modes that most video games had in the early days. Once gamers saw Quake running in OpenGL in 1997, they ran out to the stores to buy OpenGL-compatible video cards. Microsoft didn't have an alternative API to compete with OpenGL. Hence, DirectX was born. It took a handful of years before DirectX stopped being a royal pain in the ass for most gamers.
Even if that is true, it is irrelevant in a comparison of video games, where a quality video card driver is almost exclusively the only relevant factor.
All of it. Most performance improvements are in the driver side, and drivers for Windows are more performant than Linux versions in general. Windows isn't as bloated as it used to be. The fact that you can run Windows 10 on a 2GB tablet with pretty good performance is a testament to this.
But the tablet version of Windows 10 is probably not the best example since it's been optimized for the hardware (drivers). And as I stated, until you've come across a sandboxing issue, you don't know how much validation is actually being done. This applies to Windows 10 as well.
You should choose Linux because it is Open, not for performance reasons.
I totally agree with this. It still doesn't put Linux behind Windows performance wise. As a mainstream desktop OS Linux simply hasn't lived to the expectations of users and that's why Windows is still doing very well.
Actually the grandparent is right. Windows has gotten much more performance over the last few versions. With Windows 7 MATLAB ran about 20% faster on Linux than Windows. With Windows 8 the Windows version was very slightly faster and with Windows 10 the different is about 5% now in favor of windows.
Overall I suspect it is nothing magical. Microsoft has just worked very hard to offload more work to the GPU and also to optimize many other aspects of their systems for power usage. I get about an hour more battery life on windows vs linux.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Windows 10 is 10/10? Well, 10 divided by 10 equals one. But they did make the Xbox One. On the other hand, it means Xbox 1 is their third game console.
I really can't wait to see what stupid name they'll be using for their fourth console:
- Xbox
- Xbox 360
- Xbox One
- Xbox Delta?
And what did you add to the discussion? You fed a troll and are part of the problem as I see it.
While it's nice and all that we're getting 72x more performance per watt, since we are at 100x times the performance, that means that we are using 100/72=1.39 times the power that we used to.
I could start into a tirade about how this is contributing to global warming, but I'll leave that somewhat political stance for another time.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It was also the first decent general availability 3D Accelerated API. Sure, there was Glide, but that was pretty much VooDoo specific. So of course Microsoft didn't have anything to respond with initially.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
You almost got me up to that statement. I did a VM install of Win10 over the weekend; it failed the first time, because I thought that a fixed 16GB for the test partition would do. The dynamic container is at 24.738.004.992 bytes now after the Threshold 2 update. Nothing else was installed - just Win10 + updates.
Give it a try, grab the iso and fire up a VM. No need for a Windows key, you can skip entering it just like the activation.
Threshold 2, which like all updates is not optional, as we all know, took >1 hour on a 4 core system with a decent SSD and ~2,5GB RAM for the VM. I wonder what you'd call a "bloated" OS.
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
I preferred penisbird ascii
DirectX first came out in late 1995, so your understanding is wrong in that respect. Even Direct3D was included by version 2. And DirectX existed to give programmers a means to work with the Windows OS for their games.
Sp why did OpenGL and D3d come about? What happened was that the silicon to handle the necessary functions was getting affordable, and Microsoft having its own interests, instead of sticking with OpenGL, picked something they could control.
It's probably more about market-share than quality. Vendors of software and drivers target the biggest markets first because that's where the most revenue comes from, and Linux is not a big consumer market.
Same with Mac. Mac's are not cheap, but not a good game platform due to the same market-share forces.
If vendors want to go after smaller game markets such as Linux, Android, and Mac, then perhaps they should focus on strategy instead of flashy graphics. That way they don't have to optimize their software for a particular platform, and can live with the performance overhead of a platform translation layer when they write to a generic middle-ware graphics "standard".
But strategy games don't seem to be big sellers. Human "apes" are drawn to the big shiny red ball, as usual. And fancy graphics are a status symbol: keeping up with the Jones'.
Windows strategy for survival is the same as it's always been: you use Windows because everyone else is using and building for Windows, NOT because it's good.
Table-ized A.I.
Linux has much less overhead and is often tailored to squeeze every ounce of power out of it's hardware.
In what cases is it "tailored to squeeze every ounce of power out of it's hardware"? In its most common form (Android, Debian/Slackware/RedHat-based desktop and server distributions) it is about wide hardware compatibility. Even most embedded are just the stable kernel tree.
Linux if built for specific hardware can achieve much better performance than Windows in it's current state.
That's true of anything. If you make a special version of software that targets specific hardware it is most likely going to run better than software that targets a whole range of hardware.
You can run linux on a 8MB RAM system with as much performance as he processor likes to give you. ...
I bet you can scale it even down to 1MB
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
DirectX first came out in late 1995, so your understanding is wrong in that respect.
I stand corrected. I didn't become serious about video games until I got a job as a video game tester in 1997. Direct3D at work didn't become a factor until the company decided to give up software rendering mode in 1998.
Xbox: look, we have a console too!
Xbox 360: we've come full circle, maybe we did it better this time?
Xbox 1: 1 more try, 3rd time's a charm right?
ReduXbox: try, try again...
Windows 10 is 10/10
Is it easier type that with a straight face when you post anonymously? :)
The speed of MATLAB should be completely independent of the OS.
The only things where the OS could be involved is swaping/paging. If a OS is slowing down an application from its max performance there is a serious problem in the OS.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
But there are distros of Linux, like Gentoo...where you can install it and custom compile your kernel, etc...for the hardware it is running on.
If for nothing else, this is nice for squeezing out the most of your older hardware you might be wanting to run things on rather than toss it in the trash.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The worst part of OpenGL in general is the use of extensions. While you can get GLEW or other code generation solutions to create the functions looks up for you, there are the glFunc*ARB, glFunc*EXT, glFunc*, glFunc*NV, glFunc*ATI versions. It's always hit-and-miss as to whether a particular extension is supported on a particular GPU. That's all down to hardware, and that's why open-source support for old hardware is so tricky. There's 500+ extensions now, many of them are outdated/deprecated (register combiners) or only for SGI workstations. With OpenGL ES fortunately, that's all gone. Functions for a particular release are all there.
But the extension specification for OpenGL only tell you what parameters the functions accept and what result codes will be returned. There's no real explanation on how to combine functions together to do something useful. you have to either buy the official programming guides or be a blog vampire, flying around looking for information to suck. If that wasn't tricky enough, several times now, they have shoehorned new functionality into existing functions. Traditionally, you set up a pointer to a list of vertices using glVertexAttribPointer, but now you can can jam in an integer offset into that void pointer parameter when using array buffers (it offsets from the start of the buffer). Traditionally you would also use a create function to generate some object like a texture or a buffer but now there are "binding points" which are a raw set of indices you link buffers to at one side and shader uniform buffer blocks at the other side.
It's like OpenGL is trying to move to a dataflow model with vertex, geometry, fragment, compute and tesselation shaders and buffers that can all feed into each other but has to maintain backwards functionality. Fortunately, the successor is now Vulkan which just goes back to low-level programming involving allocating memory for generic buffers and textures and issuing draw commands. That's more or less where DirectX 12 and consoles are.
Yes, but you can't get much in the way of a GUI that way, and even your TUI is going to be somewhat limited. Something like Puppy Linux (100-200MB) would be a good comparison, or Lubuntu (500-600MB).
Troll grade: FAIL
Doubtful, you certainly got sucked in to writing a lengthy rebuttal. That's exactly the point of trolling, it isn't about trying to make a valid point you don't like, it is about deliberately making an invalid point to provoke a response. You lose.
Programming wise the royal pain in the ass is quite the opposite around, and it is not over. I pity those who use DirectX instead of OpenGL.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The only thing that gets people to buy new computers these days is the fact that Windows can't be
upgraded in any reasonable amount of time. Seems to me it gets more bloated all the time.
But there are distros of Linux, like Gentoo...where you can install it and custom compile your kernel, etc...for the hardware it is running on.
Yes that is what I said, if you make a custom version of software to target specific hardware you're more than likely to get better performance than software that targets a range of hardware. But in reality the investment in the hardware driver is going to provide far more value than modifying the kernel.
If for nothing else, this is nice for squeezing out the most of your older hardware you might be wanting to run things on rather than toss it in the trash.
Yet as this article demonstrates, the open source drivers for older hardware often regress into an unworkable state, obviously the time spent on making this older hardware work is not worth the effort.
Thank you for the memories of upgrading my Pentium 200 with a 3DFX Voodoo card. At the time, a mind boggling feat to have a whopping 4 megs of ram just for 3D.
GLQuake.exe here we come!
More likely I'll just get up from the sofa and does something useful instead.
In 1995. when Quake made use of the floating-point and integer units of the Pentium CPU to do software texture-mapping in a custom engine, SGI realized that they had to bring out a software version of OpenGL that would run on desktop PC's. Back then some bits of OpenGL would be implemented in hardware (the "fast path"), and other bits in software (the "slow path"). It was a pain-in-the-ass for developers to try and divine which were slow and which were fast. Some combinations of vertex/color/normal attributes were fast and others were slow. Microsoft bought out a 3D game engine developer, pulled out the lower layers and created DirectX.
The 3Dfx brought out a piggy-back board, that worked with desktop PC's. Then SGI engineers left to form Nvidia, and a great race began. First texture-mapping was hardware accelerated, then both companies try to outdo each other every quarter with new extensions. That led to a legal battle, with Nvidia winning.
Eventually by 2001, they reached having the first true full hardware accelerated consumer 3D graphics acceleration for a PC. That's continued.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
fuckssakes, stop it.
I'm a FreeBSD lover myself, but I'm sure they chose it just for the license. FreeBSD is awesome, but
Corporate America wouldn't know something awesome if it walked up to them in a big red suit. You
sound just as bad as the Loonix fanboys.
But the tablet version of Windows 10 is probably not the best example since it's been optimized for the hardware (drivers).
The version running on those tablets is the same Windows 10 you run on desktops.
It still doesn't put Linux behind Windows performance wise.
Like anything you need to look at the specific use-case and hardware involved, there is no one answer that applies to all.
My favorite rig from that era was an AMD K6-2 500MHz with a Nvidia TNT video card and a pair of 3Dfx Voodoo 2 boards in SLI mode. I could play any game in any video mode with that configuration.
In what cases is it "tailored to squeeze every ounce of power out of it's hardware"?
...an any case where the admin/owner decides to take a trip through make config , in extreme cases literally tear out unused bits of kernel from source (then recompile), or on a lesser scale, tweak up /etc/sysctl.
Now, if you mean tailoring from the OEM? That's most often found in Linux-based appliances, where the source itself is often hacked on to remove stuff the appliance would never use.
To be fair? Yeah you can twiddle with Windows Registry settings and turn off/disable excess services (I'd done both back in the day to wring out every last fps in Unreal Tournament), but you cannot literally pare out excess/unused crap in any part of the Windows microkernel itself. (I remember WinCE having something similar to that ability back in the day, but I doubt it's still there, especially for, say, Windows 10).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
This article is not that interesting, primarily because they used high settings + 2560x1440 on old 256MB (!) cards, so most likely those cars are bottlenecked by gpu system ram texture swapping, showing lower performance and lower power reading than if more reasonable settings had been used. We're not seeing GPU power compared, but vram bottlenecks instead.
I wish Valve had picked PC-BSD as their platform, instead of Ubuntu. I'd have loved to be able to play Civilization V on this PC-BSD laptop. Guess I'll have to wait until PC-BSD 11, when SteamOS jails will be included.
The difference between "should be" and "is" has some importance here. Perhaps there are some factors at work you are not aware of? Or have gotten the relative importance factors wrong?
Should be enough for anyone!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
The main reason I've favored intel MBs recently is that they've opened sourced their graphics, which are good enough for me, so I don't have to worry about them. But then, I'm not a gamer. Are there folks out there who need the high end graphics stuff for something besides games?
PS
Just for the record, I have ways of wasting my time that may not be any better than playing games so I'm not going to adopt a 'holier than thou' attitude towards gamers. And even I may benefit from the gamer world because gaming does push technology.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
In what cases is it "tailored to squeeze every ounce of power out of it's hardware"?
...an any case where the admin/owner decides to take a trip through make config , in extreme cases literally tear out unused bits of kernel from source (then recompile), or on a lesser scale, tweak up /etc/sysctl.
Not really, that might reduce the footprint a bit but it's a far cry from tailoring it to "squeeze every ounce of power out of it's hardware". I doubt many - if any - people actually do much outside of what you specified. The real hardware-specific performance gains are going to be achieved with good hardware drivers, not just omitting things from the kernel.
How fast MATLAB runs will vary based on how much CPU time it can get. If Xorg+WM takes more CPU time than Windows does then MATLAB won't have as much CPU time to run with.
Anything that makes the OS offload more work or do work more intelligently will increase the speed of any cpu bound operation. Just like you do the same total number of operations if you use a triple nested loop to multiply two matrixes or you use xGEMM. However the xGEMM version will run almost 100x faster since it uses the CPU FAR more efficiently. If Microsoft has made their system more highly optimized and better at offloading that would make MATLAB faster.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
> Microsoft bought out a 3D game engine developer, pulled out the lower layers and created DirectX.
That was due to Microsoft's NIH syndrome; they bought RenderMorphics in February 1995 and transformed their shitty Reality Lab API into DirectX.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I could see that it was less than 2, but doing arbitrary roots in your head can be tricky.
Wolfram Alpha is great when you're out and all's you got is your phone.
Human "apes" are drawn to the big shiny red ball, as usual. And fancy graphics are a status symbol: keeping up with the Jones'.
I think your problem is your inability to see anything beyond the "big shiny red ball". Go play tuxracer if you want but the latest Forza, for example, offers a *lot* more than just realistic graphics, now of course as an "ape" you can't see that can you? You're too distracted by the "shiny" to notice everything else. If you're going to try to create a realistic experience with physics, sound and AI then why would you not do the same with graphics?
Is it a guess? Or just cheering for your special toy?
Meanwhile back in reality if the CPU has less to do it performs better at the things it is doing. A stripped down MS system would also perform well for exactly the same reason.
This is truth. Anyone who has ever looked at DirectX v3 code knows real horror. It took several years for this situation to change.
The FOSS drivers for Nvidia ("nouveau") and AMD ("amdgpu") have come a long way.
They are outperforming the proprietary drivers in some games already.
That is, at least with the latest pre-release kernel, for amdgpu, and Mesa 11.
Quirks are getting fewer and fewer. OpenCL support is progressing.
However the most important advantage is that the open drivers can support old hardware forever.
The irony was that AMD hardware was even worse then than it is now. The K6 line was terrible beyond reason.
No you cant. 4M is pretty much the absolute minimum. Even using minimal busybox on linux build from scatch.
Also pretty useless at 4M.
I'm not quite following your criticism. There seems to be an unstated assumption. They could target Forza at other or multiple platforms and still have "full" physics. The physics calculations shouldn't be "lost" on other platforms, even if some graphics are, unless perhaps they are using the GPU for physics also?
Table-ized A.I.
Agreed. There's times I think they're attempting to do this themselves (owners/moderators) by ac trolling posts to spur flamewars which they claim they don't want and yet sockpuppetry goes on here like mad from karma farmers with multiple accounts for minus modding for the easily cheated moderation system here that's only used for furthering their own agendas or those of their allies and nothing more.
Trimming off services you don't need running in Windows will give you another 10-15% performance boost easily and no you don't need to run all of the services windows has on all the time by default. I suspect they set it up that way so 'everything just works' out of the box if a user requires some of those services. Yes, this can be done in *NIX of all kinds as well in their daemon processes too, but I just thought I'd put that point across too. I've been doing it for decades since the original Windows NT 3.5 model (and on Win9x, and Win3.x/DOS before it on PC's and it really works for performance boosts on the cheap as well as a more efficient system overall too).
They could target Forza at other or multiple platforms and still have "full" physics.
Why make a half-assed version for a niche platform that can't support proper graphics? Having a high resolution visual experience isn't some "status symbol" it is being able to express the vision of the art designer and to create an immersive experience for the gamer. Previously we had to expend considerable effort to scale down assets and remove detail because of hardware constraints, now the hardware is powerful enough that we waste much less time compromising the art design.
The physics calculations shouldn't be "lost" on other platforms, even if some graphics are, unless perhaps they are using the GPU for physics also?
Very often the GPU is used for physics calculations.
As a professional programmer (and hobbyist shareware/freeware dev too on the side) I always found working with OpenGL easier than doing DirectX work while doing screensavers which was my first exposure to both for animation in 3d. The api call interface was simpler in OpenGL which at the time was purely only graphics whereas DirectX had control of far more at the time than just graphics alone which might explain part of what I saw/felt on both in terms of difficulty of use in code.
That was due to Microsoft's NIH syndrome; they bought RenderMorphics in February 1995 and transformed their shitty Reality Lab API into DirectX.
That is the exact *opposite* of NIH syndrome. Instead of building something themselves they decided buy and use something that was Not Invented Here.
Do you even understand the phrase NIH at all ??
> Not Invented Here (NIH) is the philosophical principle of not using third party solutions to a problem because of their external origins.
The third-party OpenGL *already* existed and they refused to use *that*.
They *invented* DirectX by buying a company and bringing it in house.
Not anymore. Thanks to modern CPU gains in technology, turning off services will hardly make an impact on CPU usage. It will help reduce memory footprint though at best.
You must confuse it with Cyrix. Their CPUs were utter crap, but K6-2 and expecially K6-3 were quite decent when it came to ingeger performance and bearable at the FPU side.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
At the time OpenGL completely sucked and did for a long long time, DirectX wasn't just to compete with OpenGL, it was to allow them to do everything OPenGL did and a whole heap of stuff OpenGL didn't do.
That hasn't been true for a long time, many of the taxing windows services are start on demand or only operate when there is spare CPU cycles.
The original DirectX had a very different goal, but got pushed into being an OpenGL competitor.
See: http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2014/07/18/early-direct3d-com-opengl/
"Early arguments over Direct3D vs OpenGL were baffling because OpenGL IS NOT a driver model for Windows, it’s a high level 3D API."
Maybe if you keep being a shitbag, someone will slit your throat and you'll die.
FPU performance sucked. That was the problem. Back when I built my first PC I swapped a K6 233 for a Pentium 200 and saw a 25+ FPS increase in Quake 2 alone.
How do you know? "The version running on those tablets is the same Windows 10 you run on desktops." Really? You have compiled them and/or have the buildchain to verify that the source code for both is the same?
Sweet.
Got links?
Are you talking about the XBox when you claim: "Why make a half-assed version for a niche platform that can't support proper graphics?"?
Here's the reason why: there's money on the table. And in a market where you're the only racing carsim with realistic graphics and physics, you win all the money for that on that table, even if it IS small.
There's an advantage too to writing multiplatform, as any programmer knows: if it works on several systems, its less likely to have crashing bugs and to work better. It even makes QC easier, since you don't necessarily have to test every permutation of game progress, since the differences in game play on different OSes can exercise different path orders, especially useful in a multithreaded program, where nondeterministic code paths is a serious cause for bad bugs in software.
Windows performance, especially for games, is extremely good. Microsoft has now produced three games consoles and learned a lot about gaming performance from them. That's one of the reasons why the performance boost from Vista to Windows 7 was so big - they used the tools they developed for games to profile Windows code and fix the bottlenecks.
DirectX is also pretty damn good for games. OpenGL is lagging a bit, especially in terms of bringing together more traditional rendering and compute. Non-Microsoft consoles favour it but provide many custom extensions to boost performance. On PCs and on Linux it is unlikely to perform as well as DirectX in modern games.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If you wanted increase performance from the K6 233 processor, you needed to overclock to 266. However, the K6-2 500 was faster than anything that Intel had at that time. I think the Pentium topped out at 266. Intel introduced the Pentium 2 and a different socket design to compete with the K6-2 at the faster clock rates.
Have you even *played* glQuake ?? Because you keep using this word "sucked" -- it doesn't mean what you think it means.
*At the time*, OpenGL was WAY easier to **developers** as Carmack pointed out in his plan how much *Direct3D sucked*. Why do you think Windows NT _supported_ OpenGL in the _first_ place??
I know because I was one of the many game developers who signed the original petition to Microsoft to support OpenGL *at the time* instead of that shit-fest Direct3D. The fact that Microsoft's politics over internal conflicting goals, crappy driver/kernel support such as the ICD (installable client driver), Microsoft being two-faced and hypocritical with the Fahrenheit (API) didn't exactly help.
Was OpenGL perfect? Of course not. But Direct3D with its cap bits, and other stupidity, made OpenGL pure joy to code for.
The rest of DirectX solved a real problem. Direct3D just re-invented, poorly, an existing wheel.
And in typical fashion, MS never gets anything right until the 3rd version.
Why do you think Windows NT _supported_ OpenGL in the _first_ place??
Not for games. Windows NT was the business operating system. OpenGL was there to support CAD and graphic users with high-end OpenGL cards as an alternative platform to Silicon Graphics.
Welcome to the club.
The version running on those tablets is the same Windows 10 you run on desktops.
If your desktop runs ARM then maybe, but I doubt it. The other big difference is that the tablet manufacturer will tune the OS to minimize potential failure points (by removing features) and will maximize performance in the process.
Like anything you need to look at the specific use-case and hardware involved, there is no one answer that applies to all.
Absolutely. Something many /. users oversee. Hardcore gamers will invest time in "tuning" their hardware and software. Although Windows partially caters to this, Linux caters more. It that a valid argument for suggesting one if better than the other? I'd suggest the answer is no.
In what cases is it "tailored to squeeze every ounce of power out of it's hardware"?
Because of the community you get specialized version of drivers that remove unneeded checks for specific applications. This isn't possible with Windows drivers as they are usually not open source. It all comes down to the open source nature of Linux and it's distributions.
That's true of anything. If you make a special version of software that targets specific hardware it is most likely going to run better than software that targets a whole range of hardware.
Linux in it's base form is an empty shell you can fill. Windows more or less has an equivalent of this. Windows 10 IoT is probably the closest thing to it and I'm not sure how feature rich it really is compared to the Linux Kernel.
Because of the community you get specialized version of drivers that remove unneeded checks for specific applications. This isn't possible with Windows drivers as they are usually not open source. It all comes down to the open source nature of Linux and it's distributions.
You're talking about open source rather than Linux. A great deal - the majority actually - of the hardware drivers for Linux are in fact closed source.
If your desktop runs ARM then maybe, but I doubt it.
Most Windows-based tablets are x86, not ARM.
Are you talking about the XBox when you claim: "Why make a half-assed version for a niche platform that can't support proper graphics?"?
No, this article is about Linux graphics drivers and that while they have gotten better for brand new hardware they have gotten a lot worse for older hardware.
Here's the reason why: there's money on the table.
But there isn't, because the target is a niche.
There's an advantage too to writing multiplatform, as any programmer knows: if it works on several systems, its less likely to have crashing bugs and to work better.
Umm...no, there's no factual basis to support such a thing.
It even makes QC easier, since you don't necessarily have to test every permutation of game progress, since the differences in game play on different OSes can exercise different path orders
How does that result in less burden on QC? You still have to test everything and you have to test it on every target platform.
especially useful in a multithreaded program, where nondeterministic code paths is a serious cause for bad bugs in software.
And since every platform has different methods for handling multiple threads that increases the burden on QC. Just because it works on one platform doesn't mean it will work on every platform.
How do you know?
Because they're both x86, so I just installed the same OS on both.
You have compiled them and/or have the buildchain to verify that the source code for both is the same?
That seems pretty moronic, I just used the same install media on both.
The OpenGL bits that "sucked" at the time were lighting (8 or 16 light sources max, built in to the pipeline). This was great for CAD companies who just needed stuff to look like plastic, but it was awful for game developers. Also, OpenGL back then only used the begin/end model with display lists. The main vendors only optimized the paths that ID software used (various combinations of vertex, normal color and texcoords). Programmers had to speed test all the different paths to find out why there were speed differences. Some hardware vendors optimized their drivers for the application being run.
It has taken a lot of extensions to add vertex array/buffer objects, high level shaders, off-screen framebuffers, transform feedback and compute shaders. Even then the ARB commitee couldn't really agree on what features should be provided. If you look at the extension specifications from back then, hardware vendors couldn't even agree on what instructions should be provided for shaders.
From a Microsoft perspective, they are always the middle-man between hardware and applications (like shopping malls and actual plots of land). Thus they needed a device driver which they could modify and update in real-time according to the demands of the 3D industry, rather than at the speed of a committee.
If anyone remembers the first attempts at building a standard for gaming (MSX consoles), each hardware vendor would provide a system that conformed to the base standard, and then add their own "special sauce" that tied players into their platform. This fell apart when games for one system wouldn't run on another. Microsoft wanted to avoid this and just be able to state what the minimum standard was (even this wasn't enough, so they moved into consoles with the XBox).
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
On the moment an application like MATLAB is in the foreground, the OS should basically do nothing.
In other words only competing applications and the scheduling overhead of the OS should slow down any given application.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.