NVIDIA's Release Happiness Continues Into April

[deanjo]

Yeah sure.

Windows XP:

36 61 139

Ubuntu 8.10:

36 66 181

Ultimate preset. Only settings on CCC being forced on both OS' are mipmaps (High) and Catalyst AI (Advanced). Latest end-user drivers.
Alien Arena performs identical on both OS' with the same settings. The same goes for Urban Terror and Warsow. Furmark (running under Wine in Ubuntu) gives out the same scores.

Fglrx has good 3D performance. No surprise really. Where it sucks is in common desktop situations, specially when you try to accelerate them. Again, no surprise given where the driver comes from. These issues are being worked on. Sure, even I would like all these things fixed as quickly as possible, but given that the codebase is rather "new", the delays are understandable.

Drop you CPU clock by 20% and compare to your current results. Then clock your CPU back up, hen drop your vid card clocks by 20% and re-test and compare. I'm pretty sure you will find that your CPU is what is holding you back on Urban, Nexiuz and Warsow when your only running @ your 1680 res.

[Melcar]

And? I'm talking about GPU performance here.

[deanjo]

And? I'm talking about GPU performance here.

So am I, fact that they are getting identical performance is more then likely that you are cpu limited with those titles and not hitting a GPU bottleneck. Those games really don't push the video card much.

[Melcar]

Unigine Tropics
OpenGL
1680x1050
4x AA
16x AF
Shaders High
Textures High
Filter Trilinear
Reflection
Refraction
Occlusion
Volumetric

Ubuntu 8.10
fps: 25.7
score: 648

Windows XP
fps: 26.6
score: 670

Unigine Sanctuary
OpenGL
1680x1050
4x AA
16x AF
Shaders High
Textures High
Filter Trilinear
Translucence
Parallax Mapping
Occlusion
Reflection
Refraction
Scattering
Volumetric
HDR
DOF

Ubuntu 8.10
fps: 28.1
score: 1190

Windows XP
fps: 28.1
score: 1191

[homerhomer]

Just my two cents, with my NVIDIA card I don't pay attention to releases because it works correctly, with my ATI/AMD card in my laptop I keep on hoping that they fix my long standing issues.

At this point, I can't recommend ATI to anyone running Linux.

[BlackStar]

Measured with? With ATI's recent history of not rendering full scenes again it wouldn't be surprising that the linux binary is actually rendering less. Also what modes were you running in? What were the renderers? Ogl, DX9, DX10? Have you taken screenshots of both screens to compare?

Measured with an application I am developing. No abnormal optimizations I can detect. Running with the highest possible settings (purely GPU-bound), using quad-buffer stereo and disabling vsync brings the fps down to ~61 on Vista and ~72 on ArchLinux. This is at 1280x1024 on the 9.3 drivers. Reproducible with both OpenGL 2.1 and 3.0 contexts.

As pointed out above, fglrx has excellent 3d performance. Video and compiz are the workloads it struggles with, which is understandable given the workstation background of the driver.

[susikala]

So the argument boils down to the nvidia-using people trying to present themselves as 'practical', "yes it's a blob but who cares, it works better than anything ATI has to offer", and the ati-using people stress the philosophical / ideological side and the advantages of using FOSS software.

(I'm ignoring fglrx here since it's a pile of horseshit imho.)

In essence I think both sides have good arguments. Though as an ATI user, my only problem with the nvidia-argument is that performance has never been the _only_ key issue on Linux. I mean, the approach of "it should just work and work well" is very Windows-centric. So everyone of you who preaches it here and elsewhere, why do you use Linux to begin with?

I mean, Linux doesn't have many areas where its applications are superior in functionality to Windows; there are just as many and varied programs for Windows, so you can't be complaining about that either; and games are still largely a Windows domain, so that's not a reason by itself to use Linux either.

So why do you even use Linux with this approach of "it should just work and I shouldn't be bothered with it"? Isn't that just using the wrong OS?

Maybe people who have the wrong mentality should just keep to Windows instead of switching and bringing the wrong views with them about how software should be. And that sentence cannot be accused of some form of elitism: I have been a Windows user myself longer than Linux, I only switched about five years ago.

[Kano]

The problem with ATI is always that when you find a problem which seems to be specific to one app and that app is unknown than you are basically ignored for long time (if you call it normal that bug found with gl2benchmark took over 1 year to fix then you must be a huge fan). If a very widely used app then chances are higher that there would be a fix. But in some cases ATI always fails. fglrx is even worse than the limited xv support of the free driver. xv with fglrx is unable to provide flickerfree video and shows green bars with some res which are not divideable by 16. Nv has absolutely no problem showing the same video with xv or vdpau nor has the free driver. As this problem seems to generic to all fglrx drivers nobody really tested video playback, thats 100% sure.

[FunkyRider]

They problem is not because of ATI's 'a little bit inferior' driver land, it's because it is well below expectation.

I've waited FGLRX to solve some very basic problems for like 3 years. My switch to nvidia is triggered by Ubuntu 9.04's release. Nvidia's blob is already compatible with X-Server 1.6, but FGLRX? no f**king way they could accomplish that. OSS? The holy brand new 3D stack still gonna take another year to mature.

IMO before this promised 3D stack is proven to be useful, I'd better stick with nvidia. I'm a programmer with 15 years of experience and 10+ years of 3D programming, and currently in employment in a respectable 3D CAD company as a software engineer (and is well paid). I want to contribute to the OSS world with some easy to use Linux OGL Shader development tool as my hobby project (ShaderStudioMAX was my one manned project in 2003-ish and yes, it was for Windows exclusively because I wasn't using Linux until since 2005). Guess which card I have to stick to, just so I could use as a working OpenGL platform? ATI's OpenGL stack is so broken that it even ignores whether there is a Depth buffer being created or not in glutInitDisplayMode() call. Quite pathetic for them and I know for sure that even if I fire the bug report they will ignore it.

What do you call a very sick man who refuses to accept any medical treatment? A DEAD MAN.

Fortunately for ATI they chose a death-and-rebirth way to fix it.

[deanjo]

Unigine Tropics
OpenGL
1680x1050
4x AA
16x AF
Shaders High
Textures High
Filter Trilinear
Reflection
Refraction
Occlusion
Volumetric

Ubuntu 8.10
fps: 25.7
score: 648

Windows XP
fps: 26.6
score: 670

Unigine Sanctuary
OpenGL
1680x1050
4x AA
16x AF
Shaders High
Textures High
Filter Trilinear
Translucence
Parallax Mapping
Occlusion
Reflection
Refraction
Scattering
Volumetric
HDR
DOF

Ubuntu 8.10
fps: 28.1
score: 1190

Windows XP
fps: 28.1
score: 1191

Now don't you find it odd that similar system (PhenII,[email protected],8800GT first single and then sli) with exception of the GPU get identical results?

OpenGL
1680x1050
4x AA
16x AF
Shaders High
Textures High
Filter Trilinear
Reflection
Refraction
Occlusion
Volumetric

openSUSE 11.1
fps: 25.7
score: 648

Windows XP 64
fps: 26.6
score: 669

Again, you are CPU limited.