Basemark GPU 1.2 Brings Linux Support - Wins For NVIDIA, Woes For Mesa

[Ribs]

I've said it before and I'll say it again, unpopular as it may be around these parts...

The end-user experience with nVidia's drivers is quite often superior to the AMD drivers (I concede not always superior), open source or not.

Things usually "just work", and if you "don't mind" the closed source nature of the beast, you'd be forgiven to just not caring about the details and excuses as to why things aren't working if you just wanna fire up a game and kill some brain cells for an hour. I absolutely wish the nVidia drivers were as open as AMD's, but hey, if it works, it works.

[Volta]

FU with such propaganda. It seems it's nvidia friendly crap. Does nvidia shitty blob support Wayland? No? Get lost.

[torsionbar28]

Is Buyers Remorse only a thing when you buy AMD GPUs ?

I'd say other way round. I've had endless troubles with nvidia cards when the distro updates the kernel, and all of a sudden the nvidia kernel module won't compile. Or when the distro includes Nouveau by default, and then you have to manually blacklist it, and other PITA crap. With Radeon cards, everything just works. Pop in the card, boot up, just works. No 3rd party crapware to install, no manual configs. Polaris was my first experience with AMD GPU's, and it's been amazing. I'll never go "green" again.

[GruenSein]

I've said it before and I'll say it again, unpopular as it may be around these parts...

The end-user experience with nVidia's drivers is quite often superior to the AMD drivers (I concede not always superior), open source or not.

Things usually "just work", and if you "don't mind" the closed source nature of the beast, you'd be forgiven to just not caring about the details and excuses as to why things aren't working if you just wanna fire up a game and kill some brain cells for an hour. I absolutely wish the nVidia drivers were as open as AMD's, but hey, if it works, it works.

This is a perfectly valid stance on the matter since most people don't care why their apps are working well. However, I just urge you to be somewhat skeptical of this particular benchmark since - as stated before - many modern games and apps run very well and at the performance level that one would expect with the given hardware on AMD GPUs. This benchmark is the exception. So yeah, it's nice that it works with your Nvidia card but it should not be the basis for any purchase decision at the moment.

BTW: Any idea how well the AMDGPU Pro driver works with this benchmark?

[Ribs]

FU with such propaganda. It seems it's nvidia friendly crap.

Why so hostile? Are you not capable of having an adult conversation with others on the Internet who have views a little different from your own without resorting to swearing and insults? You know nothing about me, yet you feel the need to attack. I wonder what you get out of that.

Does nvidia shitty blob support Wayland? No? Get lost.

As an end user, I don't care. When I had a AMD card until late last year, I had quite a few issues with Wayland, so I ended up running X11 anyway and they just went away. Now I start a program, I interact with it, I quit it when I finish.

[SkyWarrior]

Interesting that the very same corruption is not present when ACO is used. Mesa 19.3.4 here with RX 480 and corruption is present only when vanilla RADV is used. Both AMDVLK and RADV/ACO are free of corruption.

[Ribs]

However, I just urge you to be somewhat skeptical of this particular benchmark since - as stated before - many modern games and apps run very well and at the performance level that one would expect with the given hardware on AMD GPUs.

It's an example of "this stuff is working and I don't care how, it just is and I didn't have to do anything". A few things I've tried since getting an Nvidia card have gone that way. There's certainly something to be said for having your driver in the kernel source though. I hope we get there eventually. Freesync now works on Nvidia which I never thought would happen, so the

People around here like to shit on the Nvidia driver, when it's actually good software which does a good job and the majority of distros handle without drama.

This benchmark is the exception. So yeah, it's nice that it works with your Nvidia card but it should not be the basis for any purchase decision at the moment.

Wholeheartedly agree. Buying a GPU based on one benchmark is a foolish thing to do.

[shmerl]

Expected. Nvidia is likely optimizing for the benchmark on Windows, so it's essentially not telling much. Since their driver shares the code with Windows one, it affects the Linux result.

Code optimized for the benchmark isn't necessarily a better code.

[jrch2k8]

I've said it before and I'll say it again, unpopular as it may be around these parts...

The end-user experience with nVidia's drivers is quite often superior to the AMD drivers (I concede not always superior), open source or not.

Things usually "just work", and if you "don't mind" the closed source nature of the beast, you'd be forgiven to just not caring about the details and excuses as to why things aren't working if you just wanna fire up a game and kill some brain cells for an hour. I absolutely wish the nVidia drivers were as open as AMD's, but hey, if it works, it works.

I'll meet you half way here, i do agree that nVidia have nice features and their own technologies tend to work(kinda) and when things do work they mostly perform very well BUT for me was a lottery to the point i got rid of all my nVidia cards and replace them with cheap RX570s(yeah i don't game at 4k 240hz, so is good enough for me atm, i don't need an RTX2080TI ).

Examples:

• OpenCL: depends heavily on the driver version, in some series it just works and in other is just kinda intermittently broken but ok OpenCL is not nVidia IP, so i'll let it go.
• Vulkan: MPV and DXVK have had a myriad of random issues since its release, even now if you check many bug reports from nVidia the proposed solutions basically is for A game you need driver 4xx.34 and to fix game B switch to 4xx.23 but mpv fails on that one so keep around 4xx.5x or use OpenGL renderer.
• CUDA: well this one pretty much just works and is basically the only thing i kinda miss.
• OpenGL: same as vulkan but lot less frequent now but there was a time in the early 3xx series drivers that ohh boy
• Compatibility: always been an issue with linux, even today wayland is a no go but i do expect to get eventually fixed tho.

So, sure nVidia drivers aren't horrible or unusable but is not the rose garden you are implying either with the downside that when is broken there is nothing you can do about it whereas RADV and mesa you have a ton of options if you know what you are doing since you have the code, so for power users is a nice side feature of just being FOSS.

Ok, i give you the fact that being FOSS could also have a dark side if you stay too close to git in your own builds and break your system at least for a moment(watching very intensively to LLVM)

[Volta]

Why so hostile? Are you not capable of having an adult conversation with others on the Internet who have views a little different from your own without resorting to swearing and insults? You know nothing about me, yet you feel the need to attack. I wonder what you get out of that.



As an end user, I don't care. When I had a AMD card until late last year, I had quite a few issues with Wayland, so I ended up running X11 anyway and they just went away. Now I start a program, I interact with it, I quit it when I finish.

I wasn't replying to you. It's phoronix that spreads FUD as usual. It's not the first time article looks like sponsored. Who cares about some meaningless benchmark? It's games and casual workflow that matters. I'm happy with RX 480, but I was also happy with few nvidia cards before. However, I'm nearly always using custom kernel, so only Open Source drivers work for me. Furthermore, I won't go back to X from Wayland.