Originally posted by XorEaxEax
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I'll say again the fps thing. If in cases where on other OS you'd get 100 fps or whatever, you get 30-60 on Linux, then in cases you'd get 30-60 on that other OS you'd get significantly less on Linux. Ok? Thus, I wouldn't say it's adequate. In many cases the performance of opensource drivers is good enough, but also in many other cases it's not. And those cases seem to be many more than the other OS that would get more fps or proprietary drivers. Am I wrong here?
So if you have more cases where performance is not good enough, compared to what it could be, I'd call it not adequate.
I'm sure you agree that performance on open drivers, on average, is not as good as it could. And in my opinion, not as good as it should. Although I do understand the technical difficulties, to consider them good for daily usage, I'd like better performance in relation to hardware.
For me it's probably just power management that prevents me from using them. Video decode would be very welcome too. And in my usecase, granted the first condition was met(power management), the advantages would probably indeed outweigh the disadvantages. SO I have my hopes up regarding some news that there might be progress on this front ...
And I wouldn't say we're at the point where in most cases I'd recommend open drivers instead of closed ones to people new to Linux. At least from my perspective, which I find fairly justified.
Even though we might have disagreements, I'm glad we can talk without derailing too much, unlike in other cases.
Indeed, FreeBSD may not have optimus, but I think they have more reasons to give this support on Linux. In the end, Nvidia is indeed a company, not a charity or anything ..
While not pleasant, it's somewhat expected that they wouldn't care as much as for windows. Especially if they also don't have any OEMs complaining they can't get Optimus to work on their pre-installed Linux pcs ..
It's not good, but expected due to how things work. I might be wrong, but I care more about it being implemented that how it will be. I believe for myself that it's more likely or better to implement, even if in wrong way, and then do it better. Also I believe accepting the blob and bashing nvidia would bring us one step closer to nvidia open drivers than wishing them and the blob to die. I don't think it will be easy to give us open drivers by forcing(I think it'd be to tough to do so), but maybe if they are more involved in Linux they that they can have advantages actually from open. But this is how I see things.
Besides, even if it's implemented itcould help get more users, in other words more power to actually pressure them in the long run.
I can accept though that there are legal problems, and maybe I should mention, that I don't expect or want them to implement it if it indeed is against gpl etc.
I don't like the idea that "we'll prevent them cause we hate them" though.
Making it easier for them would obviously help implement features though. But yes, we should stay within what gpl says. I don't say to revert anything, just that no need to prevent them IF it's in agreement to what they're allowed to do(cause I get the impression some people would prevent them anyways).
Also I don't like that some people are so zealous about opensource, that they want to go against everything that's not open and generally deny it. I do believe that open is better, but we can't just erase everything else in a single fell swoop. And of course Nvidia aren't victims, I don't think anyone really said so, the victims are the users. And Nvidia is indeed at fault more or less, but I'd also blame some other people, who I believe could maybe have handled things a bit better in my opinion. Just a tiny little bit.
We shouldn't see them, or anyone else for that matter, as enemies in my humble opinion.
Btw, about Nvidia's support. I can't confirm much of this with benchmarks or anything so take with a grain of salt .. Or many ..
I've read various articles, comments etc regarding graphics performance under Linux, among other things, and the general idea I got is that both nvidia and amd blobs tend to give around the same performance between Windows and Linux(native apps). But fglrx has more random bugs and features missing/not implemented that well(this I can confirm .. -.-). Under Wine though, amd performance is worse or horrible for games, personally I can confirm 70%-80% performance losses in fps on average on some games I tried. Pretty bad, huh? Although the games were playable, there was a bit of lag on Stacraft II sometimes(even on lowest settings it wasn't all gone). I should note that there was barely any decrease in performance under heavy battles(4v4 clashing with hundreds of troops from all sides, and I don't have a high end laptop ), while on Windows in the same circumstances the screen would probably update every 1-2 seconds(that was while I played, so I can confirm) .. And generally, less heat was produced(always a good thing on a laptop. With radeon I didn't try though to say, but from what I've read it occasionally performs better than Catalyst with Wine .. xD Still less than windows though.
With Nvidia blob on the other hand(not confirmed by me from here on) it seems the performance under Wine often similar to Windows, even better on cases ..!
Granted you can have working video decode acceleration, it seems to me close to the best you could have on Linux, as things stand now(not as good as it should again, some bugs here and there, and some other stuff).
And I'd generally say, that their driver mostly works pretty well, from my experience too. Although I find both Nvidia's and AMD's installers pretty stupid. Ok, AMD needs a bit of command line(can't do much without amdconfig/aticonfig, the rest is all possible through only gui though, but generally faster on terminal), but Nvidia requires to completely shut down X and the display manager to install( manually) from what I remember from last time. xD
Other than that it's not so bad for Nvidia though .. As far as support goes. With Catalyst I get various glitches, mostly on fullscreen hardware accelerated windows of any sort(wine games, browser with flash video, fullscreen flash video, even lightdm with elementary theme, and more, all give some kind of graphical glitches, making features unusable in some cases).
I hope that the driver won't get too bloated if they add all the code for Optimus themselves though.
And thanks a lot for the recommendation regarding C programming, I'll certainly have a look at it.
I was learning a bit of gtk lately, but generally I'm not experienced on programming.
**Dear God, how did I end up writing so much again .. -.-
It must be those essay/language classes I had a couple years ago .... -.-
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