ATI: Linux vs. Windows Vista

[remm]

Based on those encouraging results, I think it would be time for comprehensive ATI vs NVidia Linux testing, comparing with Win numbers for reference. I've been buying NVidia for a while, but I think this will change in the future with the specification releases and good driver performance (while I've noticed NVidia isn't working very hard on Linux driver performance ...).

[aoanla]

To be honest, I'm not sure how to interpret these results; either they show that Vista drivers are badly written (and we do know that there were certainly problems for both nVidia and ATI's first attempts at writing for Vista), or they show that the fglrx driver is really fast; or possibly they show both. Comparison with the XP drivers seems like the only way to be sure which is the case...

[Ole-Martin Broz]

ETQW isnt for 64 bit

Im running xp, and i can tell, it isnt the graphics driver, but all the crap start lagg and such, linux starts with greater fps while cpu usage/mem usage and hdd usage is high.

I dont know, i cant tell for sure, but my hd2900 XT in linux definetly beats my highly overclocked 2900 XT in windows =)

[aoanla]

ETQW isnt for 64 bit

Yes, but it runs fine in 64-bit systems with 32-bit compatibility libraries. There's a thread full of people running it in Ubuntu Gutsy AMD64 on the Ubuntu forums...

[Ole-Martin Broz]

Yes, but it runs fine in 64-bit systems with 32-bit compatibility libraries. There's a thread full of people running it in Ubuntu Gutsy AMD64 on the Ubuntu forums...

yeah.. i run it in 64 bit, but since it run 32 bit libaries, means. no improvement, or ami wrong, sounds kind of straight forward in the name: 32 bit libaries.

[aoanla]

yeah.. i run it in 64 bit, but since it run 32 bit libaries, means. no improvement, or ami wrong, sounds kind of straight forward in the name: 32 bit libaries.

It'll be using the 32-bit builds of libGL, yes, but the kernel fglrx will be 64-bit, and the underlying kernel itself will be 64-bit. Potentially, there is room for some speed up just from the increased kernel efficiency.

(In addition, since the 64-bit fglrx seems to be more likely to cause problems than the 32-bit compile, it'd be nice to see if there is any difference in their performance...)

[givemesugarr]

ETQW isnt for 64 bit

a multilib amd64 system doesn't have any problems running a 32bit application. the prof is that you can actually see wmv/asf videos, or listen to wma, or run acroread without problems in a 64bit system.
you don't have optimization for 32bit apps, but a lot of apps like kde, gnome, xorg have a better result when running on 64bit instead of running 32bit on 64bit hw (on my system this is about 10-12% of increased speed).
my idea of testing this on 64bit arch is due to the fact that i've heard that the 64bit ati isn't quite as good as the 32bit counterpart, so that a 64bit test could be interesting, so that we can also try to see what changes when compared to 32bit.

[eNTi]

why not take an nvidia card for comparision too? that would be really interesting.

[Svartalf]

now, let's return to the bench themselves:
are there texture errors or tearing during normal use of the system with the new ati drivers?! if you didn't experienced issues, may this be caused by fact that the last releases of the driver are optimized to work with the r600 series?! this could really be a reason why the new driver performs so well with the hd board.
and as a test, it would be nice if an amd64 or ia64 version could be tested, since the number of linux users using a 64bit version distro is quite high. how do these games perform with a 64bit version distro?

Heh... This would be a given, considering that the 8.41 driver set was officially only R600- you were dead on your own if you used it with anything else and they actually blocked certain classes of chipsets because they really weren't sure the code would work right on the chip or they were dead certain it'd crash in some very embarrassing ways. Now, having said this, I want, somehow, to get to the bottom of this little interesting turn of events- is it because of missing pieces in the driver's support of OpenGL 2.X or is it because the implementation meshes MUCH better with Linux with those games?

[Redeeman]

but even with faster drivers, how is compatibility for ati these days? the fglrx drivers a year ago certainly werent compatible with ALOT of stuff, like wine, or just the various opengl apps out there... have the ati provided libgl come to a point where its actually working for more than the ID games there are?