The DRM Brings Some Fun To The Linux 2.6.38 Kernel

[Azpegath]

Of course users will always prefer to get better performance, all other things being equal, but I can't really understand this kind of reasoning.

Who invests in a really expensive card to play games on Linux?

The most complex and advanced Linux games run fine on entry-level hardware, and OK on medium-level stuff. There simply are no OpenGL 3 games for Linux out there, at least not right now.

It has always been communicated by the developers that performance optimisations will arrive last, after the driver is stable and mostly complete. This is exactly what is happening.

Yes of course that is true, stability is very important in the FOSS driver. But I'm not talking about buying a very expensive card, I bought a mid-level card at the time it was released (ati 4850), because I saw no reason to buy anything cheaper if I might want to play games, either on Linux or Windows.

Most complex and advanced Linux games? Doom 3? Quake 4? Nexuiz in high resolution mode? I'm currently having issues with Minecraft in fullscreen, hehe. But I think that has more to do with the implementation that the drivers

I'm not complaining (a lot), I'm just pointing to the fact that a Linux user actually isn't getting their money's worth. Even though not all users feel that this is an issue for them.

[jobermayr]

Some distribution vendors may back-port the code as well.

openSUSE at least not:

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=663745

[bridgman]

I wasn't actually thinking of backporting the entire drm tree, just the actual changes to enable new hardware. The request in that bug was for the entire drm tree, at least that's how it read.

[pingufunkybeat]

Most complex and advanced Linux games? Doom 3? Quake 4? Nexuiz in high resolution mode? I'm currently having issues with Minecraft in fullscreen, hehe. But I think that has more to do with the implementation that the drivers

I finished Doom3 on my entry-level HD4550, and it was playable throughout, using the free drivers. Quake4 has problems with texture compression, which is a legal issue, unfortunately. It's being reverse engineered, and should work eventually. Blame software patents for that.

Nexuiz in 1080p is a bit jumpy, and not really playable, but it should be reasonable on your hardware, as long as you have the latest stuff with all the recent optimisation thingwies turned on.

[Kano]

The problem is you THINK too much. Your example does most likely not even run with OSS drivers, so what is your point? Does compiz not run fast enough for you with oss drivers or what? Your stupid WIN examples are complete bullshit. Next thing: when you write a tool that uses heavy memory transfers using OpenCL you should better run it on the CPU.

[deanjo]

i do not have an benchmark by hand but think about that: normal games load an level 1 time into the vram after that all runs in vram no load anymore.

arma2 is differend arma2 permanently pulls out vram-data aund permanently loard new stuff into the vram from the ram and you got massiv "help-texture" graphic bugs if the PCIe line is slow just because the texture loard need to much time so you ever ever watch ugly helping textures.

openCL the same more speed on the bus brings more date to the GPU and back.

Sorry man but even with Arma2 the PCI-e Bus is not a bottleneck. Take that graphics card out of a 16x PCI-e V2 slot and slap it in a 8x PCI-e V2 slot and you will notice no difference in performance. In GPGPU applications, ya sure you could see some performance increases (although not a whole hell of a lot, current GPGPU cluster solutions still use PCI-e V1.1 slots) but as there is absolutely no "free" openCL capable driver out there yet (and it looks like it is going to take a while) it doesn't matter anyways.

[deanjo]

openSUSE at least not:
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=663745

11.4 is far to far into the development cycle to start bringing in fresh stuff that is just being brought into the first release of the next kernel. It has been in a stabilizing freeze since early December. You should however be able to use the Tumbleweed repo however once the next kernel is finished and released. Alternatively you could use the KOTD repo.