Goodbye ATI

[hal2k1]

Well I personally like ATI cards better than NVIDIA for various reasons, but I m damn lazy to mess with everything and NVIDIA drivers just work and having friend and hearing constantly "that broke this broke" well I m definitly not goin to buy ATI card no matter much I would like hardware part of it...

Proprietary Nvidia drivers are the ones which break. Open source AMD/ATI drivers are part of the Linux kernel, and they are in fact the ones which "just work". They work right out of the box, no need to install anything. Nouveau open source drivers for nVidia also are part of the kernel, and they also "just work", but because unlike AMD/ATI nVidia don't release programming specifications, the Nouveau drivers are less capable that the open source drivers for AMD/ATI.

[hal2k1]

Really? Intel has got some problems with supporting older xservers, but besides from that they offer definitely more complete drivers in terms of video accelleration. You can even access the h264 encoder via vaapi, i saw gb working on a gstreamer solution, but did not try that. I am sure gb could tell me more about that. So you do not get only access to decode hardware but even to the encode one, where else do you get this? Ok, when you use x264 with veryfast profile it is usually fast enough, but on win media espresso is really extremely fast. I want that speed with an oss solution...

Intel had a lot of trouble when they were using PowerVR graphics cores.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA1NDU

Having said that, Intel do currently give better access to the video acceleration hardware.

But as for the raw power of graphics cards hardware, according to his list:

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html

... the top end Intel graphics is the Intel HD i7-2760QM, which comes in overall ranking down at number 86.

The top-ranked card is the GeForce GTX 580:

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+GTX+580

Average G3D Mark 3935

Hot on its heels is the Radeon HD 7970:

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Radeon+HD+7970

Average G3D Mark 3893

The op-of-the-line Intel graphics, HD i7-2760QM

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Intel+HD+i7-2760QM

Average G3D Mark 1180

[Fenrin]

Really? Intel has got some problems with supporting older xservers, but besides from that they offer definitely more complete drivers in terms of video accelleration...

but not in terms of Mesa 3D features. Compare xorg/wiki/IntelGraphicsDriver to xorg/wiki/RadeonFeature

Power saving features via free Radeon driver is not good on AMD/ATI cards, but it exists at least. Does such features work with Intel graphic chips under Linux No, is probably the right answer, even if it is going to change with future architectures and drivers.

[Kano]

@hal2k1

Funny benchmarks, but they have got absolutely nothing to do with Linux - especially for the oss drivers. Why dont you say directly that you use Win only? Also intel only used powervr cores for some atoms, never for ironlake/sandy bridge/ivi bridge.

@Fenrin

Your logic is really impressive. Especially when intel was the first to expose opengl 3.0 support.

[Fenrin]

Your logic is really impressive. Especially when intel was the first to expose opengl 3.0 support.

it's a well know fact that Intel is the worst with OpenGL. Many games don't even support Intel graphic drivers, because of their lack of compatibility

Thank you for the compliment

[Kano]

You are correct that BINARY nvidia/amd drivers are better supported by games. But why on earth do you compare OSS driver specs? I don't think that one game exists that runs with amd oss drivers but not with intel ones. If speed is an issue of course dedicated hardware can be much faster, but thats not the real question here.

[XorEaxEax]

you buy NEW ati hardware for oss drivers? really bad joke...

Yes, next time I upgrade my graphics hardware I will go with ATI due to them offering official open source drivers which work against the current and future kernel video subsystems and by extension any technology relying on those said subsystems. How is that a bad joke?

[hal2k1]

@hal2k1

Funny benchmarks, but they have got absolutely nothing to do with Linux - especially for the oss drivers. Why dont you say directly that you use Win only? Also intel only used powervr cores for some atoms, never for ironlake/sandy bridge/ivi bridge.

The benchmarks are for Windows, but they ultimately reflect the underlying power of the graphics hardware, do they not? The very graphics hardware that could be used on Linux systems. The same graphics hardware where the benchmark performance of the top nVidia and AMD/ATI GPUs is well over three, and approaching four times the performance of the top Intel GPU.

As for the system on which I am typing this very post:

$ uname -a
Linux enceladus 3.0.0-15-generic #26-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jan 20 15:59:53 UTC 2012 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders, total 312581808 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x17969955

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *          63    30700214    15350076   83  Linux
/dev/sda2        30700276   312576704   140938214+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5        30700278   306568394   137934058+  83  Linux
/dev/sda6       306568458   312576704     3004123+  82  Linux swap / Solaris

As you can see, it has no Windows partition.

[smitty3268]

[*]Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the Nvidia open source driver to be better than the open source AMD driver, despite AMD's support and Nvidia's lack of support.[/list]

Consider this me correcting you, because you are wrong.

[t.s.]

The benchmarks are for Windows, but they ultimately reflect the underlying power of the graphics hardware, do they not? The very graphics hardware that could be used on Linux systems. The same graphics hardware where the benchmark performance of the top nVidia and AMD/ATI GPUs is well over three, and approaching four times the performance of the top Intel GPU.

Wether it reflect the underlying power of the graphic hardware or not is not the problem. It's ultimately depend on the graphics driver for the hardware to run OK-ish or not. It's of no use if you have the best graphic card in this world if you can't use it, or if the driver can only driving 20% of the supposedly-performance, right?

So, it depend on the driver. And the OSS driver != binary blob from respected company. So, in term of function and feature,

• Nouveau != nVidia binary driver
• Radeon driver != fglrx
• for Intel, there's only open source intel driver

Cause Intel drive all their effort in Linux on their open source driver, and have a head start, it became more mature than Radeon driver which have a slow start and to separate their driver development (for now), IMHO.