Mesa Now 2~5x Faster For SPECViewPerf Following OpenGL Optimizations

[dylanmtaylor]

It's been hard to recommend Nvidia to Linux users for a couple years now. AMD's Linux drivers are fantastic. They're not the best they could be, but every minor release of Mesa has improvements and new features. I can't imagine it's easy trying to maintain drivers all way way back from GCN 1.0 while the industry keeps moving forward with new Vulkan extensions.

I switched from a 980 Ti to a Radeon VII a while back and my experience using AMD's drivers has been fantastic.

[dylanmtaylor]

It seems to be to few times faster then anticipated

I know there is impossible to make something like terrible fglrx repair performance boost as of:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=822&num=4

But I wish something like that for drivers as of today-

fglrx was an absolutely terrible driver, which had a lot of room for improvement. On the other hand, mesa is quite good, so I'd be shocked to see 50X improvements anywhere substantial

[pal666]

Amd need to put more people in all their drivers, it's only thing missing at this point great hardware again but need a lot of improvements in their drivers cpu and gpu to catch up the quality of nvidia at least

to catch up the quality of novideo amd has to move backwards

[prueba_hola]

someday AMD will have a GUI panel control

[mdedetrich]

It's been hard to recommend Nvidia to Linux users for a couple years now. AMD's Linux drivers are fantastic. They're not the best they could be, but every minor release of Mesa has improvements and new features. I can't imagine it's easy trying to maintain drivers all way way back from GCN 1.0 while the industry keeps moving forward with new Vulkan extensions.

There are 3 types of people that deliberately NVidia for Linux
1. The enterprise/HEDT users which use CUDA.
2. People who tried to get a mid range (or higher) laptop with a discrete GPU in the past 4-5 years, AMD has been terrible here, the selection of good laptops with a discrete AMD GPU are terrible
3. People who are already gaming on windows with an NVidia card (because up until the 6xxx series, NVidia has been miles ahead of AMD) and are interested in Linux.

Unfortunately people in category in category 1 are change (also there is an entire ecosystem around CUDA now and plenty of applications have been developed for it), people in category 3 have the highest potential amounts of users and people in category 2 don't really have a choice.

[Etherman]

someday AMD will have a GUI panel control

No need for that.

[oiaohm]

There are 3 types of people that deliberately NVidia for Linux
1. The enterprise/HEDT users which use CUDA.
2. People who tried to get a mid range (or higher) laptop with a discrete GPU in the past 4-5 years, AMD has been terrible here, the selection of good laptops with a discrete AMD GPU are terrible
3. People who are already gaming on windows with an NVidia card (because up until the 6xxx series, NVidia has been miles ahead of AMD) and are interested in Linux.

Unfortunately people in category in category 1 are change (also there is an entire ecosystem around CUDA now and plenty of applications have been developed for it), people in category 3 have the highest potential amounts of users and people in category 2 don't really have a choice.

CUDA users have mostly migrated to opengl es and don't use X11 any more in there big server setups so change to wayland really nothing for them.

The 2 and 3 type will have to put up with a performance hit because Nvidia has not used the last 12 years to get their driver stacks ready for Wayland.

[schmidtbag]

There are 3 types of people that deliberately NVidia for Linux
1. The enterprise/HEDT users which use CUDA.
2. People who tried to get a mid range (or higher) laptop with a discrete GPU in the past 4-5 years, AMD has been terrible here, the selection of good laptops with a discrete AMD GPU are terrible
3. People who are already gaming on windows with an NVidia card (because up until the 6xxx series, NVidia has been miles ahead of AMD) and are interested in Linux.

Unfortunately people in category in category 1 are change (also there is an entire ecosystem around CUDA now and plenty of applications have been developed for it), people in category 3 have the highest potential amounts of users and people in category 2 don't really have a choice.

4. Diehard Nvidia fans. There are proportionately fewer of them in the Linux community, but they do exist. Many of them also happen to be Wayland haters lol.

I fall under category 1 myself, at least for one of my PCs.
I've never had the slightest interest in discrete graphics for laptops, though, I can't imagine AMD had especially bad choices. Vega APUs are actually pretty good in terms of performance-per-watt, but, I'm not sure if AMD ever made discrete Vega graphics for laptops.

[mdedetrich]

I've never had the slightest interest in discrete graphics for laptops, though, I can't imagine AMD had especially bad choices. Vega APUs are actually pretty good in terms of performance-per-watt, but, I'm not sure if AMD ever made discrete Vega graphics for laptops.

By terrible I was mainly referring to the choice selection, pretty much 95%+ of all mid tier (and higher) laptops that had a discrete graphics card were using NVidia. Even personally for my case, I needed to get a new laptop a year ago with a discrete graphics card, went with Lenovo and yeah the only option was NVidia.

[brad0]

It's been hard to recommend Nvidia to Linux users for a couple years now. AMD's Linux drivers are fantastic.

Only for very specific specialized tasks will I touch anything NVIDIA (.e.g. At work with some components of SolidWorks). Anything else it's AMD or Intel. No open source drivers I won't touch it.