The Open-Source ATI Driver Is Becoming A Lot Faster

[BlackStar]

That guy is a well-known troll. Don't mind him, his condition is probably hereditary.

[blackiwid]

The benchmarks clearly show all the open source drivers are substantially slower than the proprietary ones, ...

The benchmark shows primary that the open driver is getting really fast (at least faster ^^), and even better not with the old driver but the new better Gallium drivers. Thats great news. first we have more speed (maybe also with video-playback hd? 1080p), and the new drivers are now faster than the old ones instead of trying to catch the speed from the old drivers with the new ones from a lower point.

If you are happy with the unfreeness of the closed driver (and all that comes with that), and the stability of it, be free to use it. Nobody wants to use the free driver because it ist faster but because it is free and in my feeling more stable. More speed and features are a additional point like the cream on a cake or on another desert.

[pingufunkybeat]

You're trolling, right? Please tell me you are.

He is. We get this roughly once a month.

[Jimbo]

This post seems interesting:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2011-January/004850.html

It seems that devs are aware of a few areas where the driver is slowing things down and optimizations could be implemented. We probably see more performance gains over the next months.

[Azpegath]

You got what you paid for. Enjoy.

+1 Hehe, I like your style

[xeros]

Except that Nexuiz in PTS doesn't use GLSL. If GLSL was enabled, r300g would be totally kicking ass, it would be like twice or three times faster than r300c. Enable GLSL in Nexuiz and try it yourself: "nexuiz -nosound -benchmark demos/demo2"

Yeah, I would like to see a comparision of Nexuiz or Xonotic with tweaked settings starting with GLSL option enabled. Just enabling this option gives at least twice performance boost (tested on RV350 and RV370 with kernel 2.6.35, 2.6.36 and Mesa 7.10 and 7.11-git). Probably even more, I could not count it properly because of the 'wait for vsync/vblank' problem adjusting FPS to monitor refresh rate.

[numasan]

@elanthis

Thanks, that was interesting. Not that I'm your target audience, being a non-developer and ignorant of all that goes into driver/graphics programming!

Do the driver/mesa/gallium people already know what you described? I hope so!

[DeepDayze]

That guy is a well-known troll. Don't mind him, his condition is probably hereditary.

It is so sad to see people like gordboy posting his fglrx fanboi drivel. No wonder the IQ drops whenever he comes into a thread and spouts some meaningless dribble-laden idiocy.

The FOSS ATI drivers are coming along nicely and there's hope yet for my old Thinkpad T42 with the Radeon Mobility 7500 chip. The devs should be commended for their work.

[Yfrwlf]

You got what you paid for. Enjoy.

Meaning AMD is the cheaper product in comparison to nVidia? AMD open sourced their drivers to get a bit of help with them due to being cheaper? Maybe, but I'd still rather have some of my money going into open source efforts than none at all. Of course, the best would be supporting open *hardware* projects, oh, and ASIC fab@home efforts. ^^

[marek]

Do the driver/mesa/gallium people already know what you described? I hope so!

We very well know what he was talking about and he said nothing new to us. Some of us used to be hobbyist or professional game/3D graphics/CUDA developers. We know our stuff. It's also pretty obvious that he is a coder with a good deal of skills.

Meaning AMD is the cheaper product in comparison to nVidia?

I was thinking in terms of what he paid for the software, which is like 0??