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AMD & NVIDIA: Open vs. Closed-Source Driver Performance

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  • #21
    I will say that I was very pleasantly surprised this past weekend. I just got my new Steam controller in the mail after the holiday sale, and I hooked it up and installed GRID Autosport. My aging Phenom II x6 1055t and Radeon 7850 (1GB) are able to sustain nice and fluid framerates using the radeonsi mesa driver (radeon kernel driver, linux 4.9, 1920x1200). Any issues with that game are due to the fact that I took a bit of a break from racing games and I'm having to relearn skills now.

    This is a huge contrast to a few years ago when firing up TF2 led to 5-10fps with multi-second-long pauses all the time due to shader compilation triggering.

    I'll still be buying a new CPU/GPU this year when I rebuild my desktop, but it's pretty awesome what the open-source mesa drivers can pull off on my aging hardware.

    I don't see myself buying a 4k monitor anytime soon (not willing to give up my dual-monitors, and don't have the desk space for 2x 27+" monitors), so ~1080p performance is still where I'll probably be looking to hit a sweet spot..

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    • #22
      Originally posted by patstew View Post
      It seems like AMD have got to driver parity by gimping the proprietary driver as well as improving the open source one. As far as I remember, back in the fglrx days it performed similarly to windows (when it worked), but now it seems an RX 480 with either driver is competitive with a GTX 770, whereas on windows it trades blows with a GTX 980. That's quite a lot of performance (/money) to give up for the ability to edit the driver source code.
      ATI/AMD have always had poor OGL performance. And even their Windows driver stack started to fall into disrepair about the same time they started pushing Mantle.

      AMD, simply put, doesn't have a great driver.

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      • #23
        Originally posted by gamerk2 View Post

        ATI/AMD have always had poor OGL performance. And even their Windows driver stack started to fall into disrepair about the same time they started pushing Mantle.

        AMD, simply put, doesn't have a great driver.
        Or more accurately, AMD simply put doesn't have a performance optimized OpenGL implementation. Although, Mesa is getting closer everyday and becoming more and more performance optimized as new games get ported.

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        • #24
          Originally posted by gamerk2 View Post

          ATI/AMD have always had poor OGL performance. And even their Windows driver stack started to fall into disrepair about the same time they started pushing Mantle.

          AMD, simply put, doesn't have a great driver.
          Considering the budget constrain on AMD part, it is amazing they did set a base to overhaul the complete API being inspired by their success in console market. Gaming development favoured Nvidia more when they adopted non-standard method from Gamework to CUDA impeding AMD drivers on purpose. Fortunately, things change.

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          • #25
            Originally posted by gamerk2 View Post
            AMD, simply put, doesn't have a great driver.
            amd doesn't have a great opengl driver. because they have too few opengl customers to sustain development of great driver

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            • #26
              Very nice comparison. It shows the good quality of AMD's freedom driver, even though there may be a few occasional hiccups here and there. Otoh. it's also astonishing what the nouveau people did. Of course the performance is often inferior to the related blob, but what can they do? I sometimes wonder what keeps their motivation up.
              Stop TCPA, stupid software patents and corrupt politicians!

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              • #27
                Originally posted by Adarion View Post
                Very nice comparison. It shows the good quality of AMD's freedom driver, even though there may be a few occasional hiccups here and there. Otoh. it's also astonishing what the nouveau people did. Of course the performance is often inferior to the related blob, but what can they do? I sometimes wonder what keeps their motivation up.
                they could reverse engineer the blob to get reclocking working. Such cases are protected by law.

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                • #28
                  Originally posted by gamerk2 View Post

                  ATI/AMD have always had poor OGL performance. And even their Windows driver stack started to fall into disrepair about the same time they started pushing Mantle.

                  AMD, simply put, doesn't have a great driver.
                  See here for example: http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages...review,14.html
                  Yes, the windows diver is a bit slower on openGL than directX, but the RX480 is still much better that a GTX780Ti even on openGL, whereas this Phoronix review shows it being much worse. Admittedly I haven't had an AMD card for about a decade now due to crap linux support, but when I did there was not such a marked difference between fglrx and windows.

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