AMD Catalyst Linux OpenGL Driver Now Faster Than Windows Driver In Some Tests

[Kano]

@-cae

Do i guess right that you use KDE with xrender FX enabled? This does not work, i would disable KDE FX or use at least any OpenGL backend. Then steam will run with fglrx again...

[gregory]

AMD Catalyst Linux OpenGL Driver Now Faster Than Windows Driver In Some Tests

nowt wrong with my 2900xt
AMD have now said there is no need to recall any cards and they have it under control

[-cae]

I was curious, so I did some tests on both systems/ both drivers. At least I tried

	Mesa 10.5.0-devel	D3D9	D3D11	GL/Windows	fglrx
Heaven 4.0 no tess. (score/fps)	608/24.1				987/39.2
Heaven 4.0 tess. extreme (score/fps)			831/33.0	707/28.1	683/27.1
Valley 1.0 (score/fps)	794/19.0	1674/40.0	1754/41.9	1461/34.9	1413/33.8
TF2 (fps)	61.30	74.22			???

My system: i5 750 at 3.6 GHz and HD7950 at 880MHz.
Ubuntu, kernel: 3.18 for radeonsi, 3.16 for fglrx
Windows 8.1
AMD Omega driver on both systems

A few notes:
- I'm sorry I didn't bench all possible combinations - but I think the relevant ones.
- TF2 is totally playable with radeonsi, but it can drop really low on intense fights - like the one in the benchmark. Which doesn't really happen in the D3D9 version. You can download the demo and look for yourself: http://teamfortress.tv/thread/7598/tf2-benchmarks, folder is ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Team Fortress 2/tf
- TF2 is limited extremely by CPU - therefore it's odd, that the linux version doesn't perform as well as the windows one by quite a margin
- I wasn't able to lauch steam with fglrx -- I haven't installed this driver for a long time and I probably will not in the future... installing it on a not pristine ubuntu is just one big hassle

So what's the conclusion: yeah, AMD's GL performance on Windows is basically the same as with fglrx (if it works). But D3D is always faster in GPU bound situations on the few benchmarks I ran.
fglrx though - it reinforced all my bad feelings about this driver. Tearing in firefox, doesn't work with steam / the installation is utterly broken, vsynch introduces immense lag, etc. Good thing this crap will hopefully be replaced in the future - and now I will purge it from my system, after I had to delete ALL personal settings regarding unity to get it to work. Bye

[YoungManKlaus]

What I am most impressed with is the improvements in the OSS drivers. I remember benchmarks where the _best_ one was at 50% performance and the average was around 20%.

[brunis]

More cross platform game engines please.

Phoronix: AMD Catalyst Linux OpenGL Driver Now Faster Than Windows Driver In Some Tests

Earlier this week I showed benchmarks of AMD's incredible year for their open-source Linux driver and how the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver moved closer to performance parity with Catalyst. One of the lingering questions though is how does the Catalyst 14.12 Omega Linux driver from December compare to the latest Catalyst Windows driver? Here's some benchmarks looking at the latest open and closed-source drivers on Linux compared to the latest Catalyst Windows release.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=21296

Both linux drivers loose out to win7 big time on the only game engine benchmark you are running.

Would be nice to see some more cross platform game engines, instead of these isolated theoretic ones. How about one of the dozens of id software games?

[GreatEmerald]

Nobody.

I do hope that OGL-next will be Mantle.

I hope it will be much more secure than Mantle.

[drSeehas]

Says who? ...

Nobody.

I do hope that OGL-next will be Mantle.

[CrystalGamma]

(OpenGL 5 will be Mantle).

Says who?

We all know that AMD has made all Mantle resources accessible to Khronos, but I'm pretty sure many changes will be done.

I do hope that OGL-next will be a stateless, concurrent API (like i think Mantle is supposed to be, but how could I know because AMD hasn't fucking published it).

[drSeehas]

... Some people may only want some alternatives additionally, but OpenGL included. ...

Hopefully some day Mantle will replace OpenGL (OpenGL 5 will be Mantle).

[dungeon]

What is funny is that often "native" is slower than wine+nine

Faster does not mean better, in that case. It might be compiler diff, sound card diff access, anything... but in the end of story API too, for the native games. For wine/nine too, additionaly it might just missrender something and give you higher framerate, some performance even depends how wine is compiled, or do you use or not some native dlls, etc...

Even on Windows one same game or benchmark, if tested across Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1 will likely have different performance... So Fedora/Debian/Arch/Ubuntu/Gentoo/etc. also likely have different performance.

And if you just change the GPU you use, all things again can be different