NVIDIA Linux Driver Continues Running Strong Against The GeForce Windows Driver

[Daktyl198]

Don't you think this video has been a bit overplayed? There are some valid points but most of it does not apply to what many people experience today.

Maybe people who have horrible experiences with X just have crappy video drivers or something? I don't know. We keep seeing this presentation over and over about how horrid and unusable and awful and crippled and fundamentally broken X.org is and how it runs on baby kitten fetus blood, etc., etc. I'm just not seeing it. The code and the protocol might be a trainwreck, and writing an actual Xserver implementation or driver might be slightly less painful than jumping off a building head-first into a thumb tack... but the user experience is nothing like that.

Hmm... I always took away a different message from that video...
That is, "Here are the flaws with this thing we all love. They are many, and they _can_ be pretty severe. But we aren't allowed to change them. Here's this new project we're making that Fixes 95% of the flaws in X, while doing things almost the exact way we have X working now because it's a pretty damn good setup."

It's more of a "We're taking what we already know and love, and making it better at the core" than "X runs on kitten fetus blood and we need to ditch it for this new-fangled thing"

[Gps4l]

Is wayland not doing what de X server can't ?

Breaking some compatebilty with very old stuff, which prevents the X server to make the same progress.

I know I have seen or read this somewere.

Also about the name, they were thinking of calling it X12 or something like that.

[pumrel]

OpenGL comparison is fair, I have nothing against the method of the test, however I think we should really compare DirectX on Windows and OpenGL on Linux as what matters the most to users is gaming performance and simply put DirectX is dominantly used for 3D acceleration in games on Windows. And if Linux is to compete with Windows in terms of gaming performance its OpenGL must be able to stand up against DirectX.

[xpander]

If nvidia would take linux serious, they would bring their killer panel (screenshot in post) to linux!

i have a maxwell graphics cards which supports all the fancy shit, but only on windows, so wtf!

(Shadowplay, Auto Performance Adjustment, Optimus)

i seriously hope that they wont bring that killer bloat panel to linux.
but yeah they could add couple new features to nvidia-settings instead. would be neat

[Gps4l]

OpenGL comparison is fair, I have nothing against the method of the test, however I think we should really compare DirectX on Windows and OpenGL on Linux as what matters the most to users is gaming performance and simply put DirectX is dominantly used for 3D acceleration in games on Windows. And if Linux is to compete with Windows in terms of gaming performance its OpenGL must be able to stand up against DirectX.

Exactly this.

I am a gamer and a linux fan. For years I was very disapointed how most of the Linux world reacted to games.
Reactions like, nobody games on Linux and go install windows.

To keep this simple, the ONLY reason my pc is dual boot is because of games. ( and to be sure my resume is 100% compatible with windows used by recruiting offices and so on )
Can you guys imagine my frustration about win7, giving issues with some older games ?

At the end of the day I am a gamer and user, who is only interested in one thing.
Does my game run faster on Linux then on Windows. As a gamer I am not interested if direct X or openGL is used.
Because I am also a nerd, of course I am interested in both openGL and DirectX.
Years ago most of the games on windows had the option to choose between openGL or DirectX.
I did not had a clue what openGL was, but I tried it, and went back to DirectX because that worked better for those games.

Then tried a dvd which came with a computer magazine. SuSE 9.3 if I remember right.
I was instantly hooked on Linux.
Yes some programs did take more effort to get it running, but on Linux my pc was more stable. ( and still is)

I was also surprised, this free os is better then the one I payed for.

I nearly went insane of joy, when I read the first rumors about steam coming to Linux.

And then there was this article about faster Zombies:

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/

OpenGL versus Direct3D on Windows 7

This experience lead to the question: why does an OpenGL version of our game run faster than Direct3D on Windows 7? It appears that it?s not related to multitasking overhead. We have been doing some fairly close analysis and it comes down to a few additional microseconds overhead per batch in Direct3D which does not affect OpenGL on Windows. Now that we know the hardware is capable of more performance, we will go back and figure out how to mitigate this effect under Direct3D.

To end with something a developer of Croteam said, because people complained about their game Serious Sam 3 on Linux.

There is no reason why our game should run slower on Linux then on Windows. I expect that if the Linux drivers get on par, our game will be a few fps faster on Linux.

Croteam was not been taken serious by some people. But it was Croteam who told us to turn of the power governor on Linux.
It took the Linux community about two years to find out they were right. The governor did not work right when it came to game performance.
It was set to on demand, and made my games on Linux lag bad.

Years before steam on Linux, Croteam was already working on Linux versions of their games, but they never got to official releasing those versions.
Steam to Linux was for them the opportunity, they were waiting for.

I can tell from personal experience they were right. It took AMD way longer then I liked, but with one of the driver updates, Serious Sam 3 suddenly did run as smooth on Linux as it did on Windows.
I did no longer have to play at a lower resolution on Linux, to name one specific issue.

@Micheal, if I was not unemployed, I would have donated to this site already. I hope to find a job again soon, so I can follow up on this promise.
And phoronix is one of the few sites, were I have addblock disabled. I cant say I am happy about the advertisement, but we all need money.

[zoomblab]

The conclusion IMO from the OpenGL comparison articles for both Nvidia and AMD is that the official Linux support (through manufacturer backed drivers) has risen to the same level as Windows. I suppose this is very important for game developers that will be evaluating what to do with the Linux situation.

[justmy2cents]

Don't you think this video has been a bit overplayed? There are some valid points but most of it does not apply to what many people experience today.

Maybe people who have horrible experiences with X just have crappy video drivers or something? I don't know. We keep seeing this presentation over and over about how horrid and unusable and awful and crippled and fundamentally broken X.org is and how it runs on baby kitten fetus blood, etc., etc. I'm just not seeing it. The code and the protocol might be a trainwreck, and writing an actual Xserver implementation or driver might be slightly less painful than jumping off a building head-first into a thumb tack... but the user experience is nothing like that.

i think you missed the point of talk completely. this talk was more of experience of X developer than user. X does work awesome for me without a slightest hitch, but just seeing wayland on F21 is a breath of fresh air. you notice little things like really smooth scrolling or resizing and so on. things that you didn't even know they bugged you

here is a short summary
he tells why we have beautiful fonts now. coz they are rendered locally and avoid X. X protocol defines otherwise.
he also says why we have pretty nice desktop. because what compositor is actually doing is avoid 99% of X and just dispatches full picture almost begging X to not touch it. in X protocol each input field is its own window.
when he shows the X error he doesn't say user sees it. people like toolkit developers have to jump hoops so you and me don't see that
he also says that most of their latest achievements is deleting code which they are slowly running off.
now, major problem is when developer says they don't fix the problems because they can't change protocol. when fixing problems is set to avoid them... mpt good really from developers standpoint

and it ends up with nice summary what wayland does. it cuts out terrible middle man that everyone has been avoiding for last 8 years or so. that terrible middle man is replaced by lean, mean middle man that does just what everybody was asking X to do.

broken by design while still working (as he explained it) and broken (as you understood it) are 2 completely different things. not even related

[david_lynch]

performance was never the problem. especially for full screen where most of the work is running directly on card. but, for what is wrong you really want to see this presentation of Daniel Stone. although he is presenting wayland, he took different road and presented X.Org for most of the time and with that all that is wrong with it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQoQE_HDG8g

and presentation is damn awesome to watch unlike most that are borrngly serious. and one thing more, he was one of major X.Org developers, so this is a bit different than reading some XY posting on internet

Very interesting presentation. After watching it, you almost wonder how X even works, and immediately want to try wayland... but then... oops, there is nothing working yet. Well, there's xwayland, but that's still X. One of these days....

[adakite]

As said, comparing OGL under Linux with D3D on Windows would be more relevant as OGL games (we talk about games) are less developed and played on Windows.

On the other hand, I would love to see benchmarks on the GPGPU (Cuda/OpenCL) side and see if Linux shows similar results (I would expect better to be honest) than Windows for such tasks. The Cuda blob is supposed to be almost similar for both OSs like the graphics drivers...so

Maybe running the SDK examples on the same hardware would be a good start (I don't have any Windows license, this is why I'm asking here).