Phoronix Readers Are Still Mostly Relying Upon Proprietary Linux GPU Drivers

[Veto]

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.

Well the game is playable in windows on lowest settings - even on Intel HD 4600. In Linux the game crashes very often, and on RadeonSI there are visible artefacts. (Eg a thin noisy line around the text boxes in the game menu).

But thank you for the positive datapoint regarding Tonga. Does it run OK for you without glitches?

[Jonathan Silverblood]

I wonder if people with strong idealogical beliefs that orient around freedom would be more willing to use open drivers and less willing to use twitter...

[mannerov]

Well the game is playable in windows on lowest settings - even on Intel HD 4600. In Linux the game crashes very often, and on RadeonSI there are visible artefacts. (Eg a thin noisy line around the text boxes in the game menu).

But thank you for the positive datapoint regarding Tonga. Does it run OK for you without glitches?

On it I get no more crashes in-game. I still get the line around the text boxes, and water reflection is sometimes black when looking from high, but that's a game bug that proprietary drivers have too.
I think it's game code related, but almost everytime when playing solo I have to delete the Island save else it crashes at load.

[dungeon]

I am not on twt, just not sure you will have 329 votes over weekend here

So who are really those people? If you ask random people that question, majority will not even understand what that open/closed is.

Ask people here which driver they use primarly and then *don't give them an option nor suggestion what is closed one or open one*, they should know if they know

Those easy click polls are BS really, "Do you use the open-source or closed-source (Catalyst, binary NVIDIA, etc)" there you didn't suggested opensource drivers names isn't it? Made it even more simplier as:

"Do you use opensource GPU drivers?"

- Mickey Mouse
- Pluto
- Both
- Yes
- Donald Duck
- No
- Steamboat Willie

or just change options too:

- DOTA2 (Reborn)
- Counter Strike (Source/GO)
- Both
- Yes
- Uncharted 4
- No
- Minecraft

etc...

[Adarion]

What is Twitter?

Same here - I have no clue. Might be similar to this ominous facebook. I heard people mention that.

[Luke_Wolf]

I wonder if people with strong idealogical beliefs that orient around freedom would be more willing to use open drivers and less willing to use twitter...

no, now if you were to ask

I wonder if people with strong ideological beliefs that orient around free or open source software would be more willing to use open drivers and less willing to use twitter...

then it becomes an open question to which the answer is probably yes if you think about groups like the FSF and people like Theo de Raadt

[Adarion]

Will post poll next weekend on both twitter and forums and look for difference.

Honestly I believe there are, of course, different crowds out there. If you ask on a tech website about Linux you'll get answers, if you ask on Grandma's best pie recipes chances are that barely anybody but the site admin will be in touch with Linux (let aside the "invisible" Linux like Android or embedded / headless devices like routers and so on). You will likely receive different sets of answers.
And so I guess there might be differences also in this case. Not that much difference since there is also an overlap.

On the other hand, GPU driver related things generally tend to be ... mixed in all aspects. Fanboys of every camp.
That might start a "nice" flamewar. :/

[Slartifartblast]

Same here - I have no clue. Might be similar to this ominous facebook. I heard people mention that.

Twitter is a polite name for haemorrhoids, a pain in the ass and something you don't want.

[mannerov]

But thank you for the positive datapoint regarding Tonga.

BTW, if you plan upgrade for tonga, you may want the 380X, which will be tonga with more cores.
I also advise to take a 4GB version, because 2GB is pretty short (Ark uses a bit more than 2GB here, so if I was limited to 2GB, I would get some stalls when it would load/unload textures). I have the 380 MSI gaming 4G edition.

[soulsource]

It'd also be interesting to distinguish between GPU manufacturers. Given that the AMD open source drivers are much closer to the proprietary AMD drivers, performance wise, than the open source nVidia drivers are to their proprietary counterparts, I would expect a significant difference between these two.
I'd also include Intel proprietary drivers as an option, just to see how many people click it ;-)

In the meantime, you can check out the results of the Gaming on Linux survey for October, where they asked their community about their driver usage.