Phoronix Readers Are Still Mostly Relying Upon Proprietary Linux GPU Drivers

[mannerov]

Hi Marek,

Thank you for all your hard work!

If you could do some magic to make ARK: Survival run a bit better and not crash all the time, my son would be very grateful (The problem may be with the game port though...)

There is no miracle, this game is just very heavy. And it doesn't scale very well with game config.
Mesa git should already help significantly (the game seems to like the arb_copy_image extension), but then don't hope too much.
With your card the game won't be extremely fast on windows as well.

With tonga and dpm, mesa git, full hd, I get 90 fps for low, and 30 fps for high. (before dpm and before arb_copy_image, it used to be 6-8 fps whatever the settings).

[profoundWHALE]

Can we have a poll on the website for how many Phoronix readers use Twitter

[SystemCrasher]

Asked via phoronix on Twitter

EPIC FAIL!

If you want to learn how many PHORONIX readers are using <somethng>, you have to ask them here, on PHORONIX, obviously. Asking it on twitter is a bullshit and could lead to skewed results. Okay, we know that 57% of users of phoronix who are using twitter... but wait, this makes really false assumption everyone on phoronix is also visiting Phoronix twitter (and uses twitter, in first place).

Speaking for myself, I do not give a fuck about twitter, so I haven't even been aware of it at all. Not to mention I can't vote since I do not have twitter account. So you haven't accounted my vote at all. Feel free to add my +1 vote for opensource drivers.

...and if we take a look on, say, forum, and other stuff, it seems to be a bit more interesting:

- Intel lacks proprietary drivers at all, and integrated GPUs are quite widespread. You can't use proprietary driver, because there're none. LOL. I would consider Intel epic, but their awful hostile attitude on hardware level and breakage of expectations about their products (like crappy OpenGL 2.1 on 4-5 year old hardware) do not contribute to good perception of Intel, so...

- On AMD side, I can see open driver forum became more popular than catalyst recently. That's what I would call a major milestone for opensource :P.

- Nvidia users seems to be all about proprietary drivers. Probably because nouveau is unusable on most setups anyway and nouveau devs are, uhm, very strange. Speaking for myself, I wouldn't count much on this driver. It seems nvidia users are even less optimistic about it. Just compare nvidia opensource driver and amd opensource driver forum activity. AMD got like an order of magnitude more opensource fans. And these are also filing bug reports, trying to mess with bugs, eventually reverse engineer something, and so on. Far more powerful and successful provess to the date.

[pouar]

I use the open source radeon drivers, but when I switch to an AMDGPU based card I may start using Catalyst as it's quick and easy enough to switch between one and the other and works across kernel versions

[imirkin]

Probably because nouveau is unusable on most setups anyway and nouveau devs are, uhm, very strange

Care to elaborate on what you mean by nouveau devs being strange? Also how does developer personality affect driver adoption?

[buzzrobot]

I'm fine with Haswell video on any distribution that isn't ancient. The annoyances I do encounter seem to have more to do with the window manager in use and little or nothing to do with the driver. At least, they don't go away when I do install a proprietary driver.

The difficulty of cleanly uninstalling a proprietary drive on some distros probably contributes an incentive to keep one.

There's a 750ti in the machine that I don't even bother trying with Nouveau any more.

[GreatEmerald]

I use proprietary drivers, although they are a huge pain. But unfortunately (as imirkin certainly knows due to me pestering and stuff ) nouveau isn't usable for me as it just locks up the GPU every time I try to launch Plasma 5. Which apparently can be caused by a whole plethora of different reasons.

[imirkin]

I use proprietary drivers, although they are a huge pain. But unfortunately (as imirkin certainly knows due to me pestering and stuff ) nouveau isn't usable for me as it just locks up the GPU every time I try to launch Plasma 5. Which apparently can be caused by a whole plethora of different reasons.

Sorry, I don't remember your specific issue, but a lot of plasma 5-related lockups were fixed by a recent patch which made it to 4.3 and is now percolating to various stable trees (got a cc notification for 3.2 even... heh). These were of the set_domain: failed variety. If you have something else, the patch will have no effect.

[Thaodan]

A bit ot but: About Civ 5 has anyone the issue that it crashes like hell, especially in rund 300+ ? (Arch Linux, KF5, Nvidia Driver, Geforce 580).

[Kano]

@buzzrobot

Do you use installers or use distribution provided packages. Those are relatively simple to uninstall!

Btw. if somebody needs binary Nvidia 340, 352 or AMD Catalyst 15.9 drivers - even live - try Kanotix 64 Spitfire KDE Special with active gfxdetect.

http://debian.tu-bs.de/project/kanotix/pxe/iso/