A Game Developer's Perspective On Linux Driver Quality

[pali]

I think he doesn't give enough credit to the Radeon Gallium driver.

Yes, but this one sentence is probably enough:

"At some point, the open source driver for Vendor B's GPU may be a more viable path forward then their half-functional closed source driver."

[blackout23]

Also to note, he hasn't tried out A or B's open source drivers.

Which is good, because we don't want him to comit suicide over A's open source driver which isn't really developed by A to be fair.

[DMJC]

A = Nvidia
B= ATi/AMD
C = Intel

Pretty obvious. Nvidia uses a lot of Sillicon Graphics Inc code, hence why they won't open it. Interesting read about nvidia's OpenGL driver being broken, wouldn't have known from the consumer experience of using it.

[Dukenukemx]

A=Nvidia
B=AMD
C=Intel

[zanny]

Nvidia uses a lot of Sillicon Graphics Inc code, hence why they won't open it.

This is not an excuse or a justification for how insanely anti-FOSS the company is. AMD can't FOSS Catalyst for similar patent, trademark, and copyright reasons, so they just devoted developers to Mesa. Nothing except Nvidias own vindictiveness, awful legal department, and executive board stops them from doing the same.

[carewolf]

I loved the link in the comments to https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2013/09...all-fameshame/

More analysis of various bugs in the drivers and even moves on to mobile GPU drivers

[startzz]

Well, some bugs found in article - wtf ??? intel driver #1, driver #2 ??? in what galaxy ??? intel has only one opensource driver, thats it. And more fixes - intel only rules in cpu market, their "gpus" sucks, and they are terrible at software/drivers stuff.

[Vim_User]

Well, some bugs found in article - wtf ??? intel driver #1, driver #2 ??? in what galaxy ??? intel has only one opensource driver, thats it.

In our galaxy. Intel has a totally different driver for Windows, it is not realted to the Linux open source driver.

And more fixes - intel only rules in cpu market, their "gpus" sucks, and they are terrible at software/drivers stuff.

Intel sells more GPUs than AMD or Nvidia, like it or not.

[fscan]

Well, some bugs found in article - wtf ??? intel driver #1, driver #2 ??? in what galaxy ??? intel has only one opensource driver, thats it. And more fixes - intel only rules in cpu market, their "gpus" sucks, and they are terrible at software/drivers stuff.

The article is about OpenGL not Linux. Intel has a separate team for windows and linux, therefore 2 drivers.

[blackout23]

This is not an excuse or a justification for how insanely anti-FOSS the company is. AMD can't FOSS Catalyst for similar patent, trademark, and copyright reasons, so they just devoted developers to Mesa.

This myth has already been debunked. There is no IP that keeps AMD from open sourcing their drivers. It's their "OpenGL secret sacue" that they don't want others to see. AMD said it themselves.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_catalyst_kernel&num=1

For those wondering why AMD doesn't just completely open-source the Catalyst code-base, I posed that question again to AMD this week. While Linux users have traditionally been quick to think that AMD doesn't open-source their driver over "third-party IP/code", that apparently isn't the primary reason. It was explained that there's little third-party code/dependencies within the Catalyst code-base and that AMD has even licensed Catalyst code-base to some (undisclosed) licensees in the past. Thus the Catalyst code-base has already been scrubbed to make it licensable and these "third-party" reasons for not open-sourcing the driver is actually a common misconception. One of the big reasons for not open-sourcing Catalyst remains concerns about AMD's "secret sauce" within their OpenGL driver code in having a competitive advantage with having some hot optimizations within the driver and other novel code that they would prefer their competitors to not see or utilize. There apparently aren't many secrets within AMD's kernel code.