15-Way Open vs. Closed Source NVIDIA/AMD Linux GPU Comparison

[calim]

I think nouveau is looking so much worse now because Nvidia has paid a lot more attention in the past 2 years, regardless of Linus' opinion. I personally think the noveau drivers need to take things 1 step at a time and focus on older hardware (like geforce 6000 or 7000) series first and work their way up.

That's not how it works. It's like saying you have to learn how to drive a horse carriage before you can learn to drive a modern car.

[brosis]

Thank you!

Michael, do you know if Vadim?s shader optimizer has been already merged into radeon? I have some beers for him, if I would be able to get positive results. People report they should be fantastic!

[schmidtbag]

Open source AMD drivers are in pretty good shape for desktop users. Fast enough for many 3D apps and almost support OpenGL 3.3. What I really miss is fully working OpenCL support.

Agreed. Considering the lack of developers and attention they give, the open source AMD drivers finally aren't the worst. I remember about 2 years ago they were nearly worthless, while the nouveau drivers were glitchy but the performance ratio was acceptable. I think nouveau is looking so much worse now because Nvidia has paid a lot more attention in the past 2 years, regardless of Linus' opinion. I personally think the noveau drivers need to take things 1 step at a time and focus on older hardware (like geforce 6000 or 7000) series first and work their way up. They might learn how things work better if they can complete a simpler product. You can't expect someone to be a physics major without learning trig, so I don't see how driver devs can learn how to properly operate a GTX600 series card without figuring out how to maximize the performance of GPUs from 10 years ago. I'd say the same about the ATI drivers but some of the older ATI devices are on par or even better than the closed source on Windows.

[calim]

This is an interesting comparison. I think in some cases the benchmark might have been CPU or driver limited. Especially with the AMD proprietary driver when results of the higher end cards were very close at several hundred FPS.

To see how pointless and hopelessly slow nouveau is, let's pick an example in its favour, say 9800 GTX vs Radeon 6950.
The Radeon card is about twice as powerful (http://www.hwcompare.com/6180/geforc...adeon-hd-6950/).

OA 0.8.5 1920x1080:
fglrx: 390 fps
nvblob: 525 fps ... clearly half as fast
r600g: 250 fps
nouveau: 300 fps ... right, nouveau is unusable garbage if it's only 20% faster on a card that's half as powerful

or Reaction Quake 3:
r600g 76 fps, nouveau 168 fps

or xonotic:
235/120 vs 240/112 fps, roughly equal

So stop bashing nouveau for performance. Yes it's buggy and reclocking doesn't work yet by default but we're getting there.
Ok I hope I didn't miss anything.

[Vim_User]

Am I missing something? Except in Warsow and Reaction Quake an old 8800GT literally blows my HD6870 out of the water?
Is there something I don't get or is AMD's closed source driver really that bad?

[chithanh]

This is an interesting comparison. I think in some cases the benchmark might have been CPU or driver limited. Especially with the AMD proprietary driver when results of the higher end cards were very close at several hundred FPS.

Testing at higher resolution (e.g. dual or even triple 1920x1080 monitors) would put more emphasis on GPU performance and maybe show a greater difference between the cards.

Also I would have liked to see llvmpipe in this comparison, as the 8350's 8 cores could give results close to the low-end cards.

[wargames]

Open source AMD drivers are in pretty good shape for desktop users. Fast enough for many 3D apps and almost support OpenGL 3.3. What I really miss is fully working OpenCL support.

[Nuc!eoN]

Fuck you nVidia!

LOL, was the first thing that came into my mind to post here :/

[Danny3]

Sad

Fuck you nVidia!
Intel, please make better hardware, I can't wait to leave this assholes behind.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: 15-Way Open vs. Closed Source NVIDIA/AMD Linux GPU Comparison

Combining the work of the recent Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Linux testing and Radeon Gallium3D vs. AMD Catalyst testing articles, here is a 15-way comparison of both the open-source and closed-source AMD and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers when testing a mixture of NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards on Ubuntu Linux 13.04.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=18688