Painkiller Linux Dev Recommends Non-NVIDIA Open Drivers

[nightmarex]

I gave the OS a try not to long ago on my 7870... It performed smooth and well... when it worked. Crashed in source games every time (yes i tried disabling multicore) . I was surprised though that it was able to render in full HD in the games i could play... temps were out of this world though. The OS driver even played skyrim in wine... really smoothly, crashed xorg when exiting the game but it was still impressive..lol

I have had great luck (apparently) with the catalyst drivers for quite a few cards now... I would say the biggest flaw is the late xorg and kernel support but that's becoming less of a problem lately.

[VinzC]

Wrong title!

"Painkiller Linux Dev Recommends Non-NVIDIA Open Drivers"

should instead be

"Painkiller Linux Dev Recommends Open Drivers for Non-NVIDIA [hardware]"

[droidhacker]

All that actually says is that nouveau is WORSE than nvidia's craptacular blob, and that AMD blob is (and this is quite obvious for just about everyone who has used both blob and open source radeon drivers) worse than AMD OSS. Makes no comparisons between nvidia blob and amd oss.

[Vim_User]

All that actually says is that nouveau is WORSE than nvidia's craptacular blob, and that AMD blob is (and this is quite obvious for just about everyone who has used both blob and open source radeon drivers) worse than AMD OSS. Makes no comparisons between nvidia blob and amd oss.

AMD should re-think the value of their blob and evaluate the work done by the developers for the proprietary driver if game developers start to recommend the free drivers instead.

[sarmad]

Not surprising at all. I spent this last weekend trying to get Catalyst to work properly on my Radeon HD 6750M hybrid graphics laptop. Here is the problems I got:
* Installing using apt-get or the Additional Drivers utility breaks the system, X doesn't start or starts with no hardware acceleration.
* Installing the stable driver from ati.com broke the system. X doesn't work anymore. Had to install the latest beta to fix it.
* The beta works, but VSync doesn't work. Tearing is everywhere and modifying VSync options make no difference at all. Games that depend on vsync for timing (Superfrong HD) was running ultra fast that it's not playable.
* Switching to the integrated GPU from the Catalyst control center works fine, but it breaks the GLX direct rendering which is required by Steam. So, Steam doesn't even start.

If only Intel releases a high performance GPU/APU. That would be the best.

[Hamish Wilson]

Looks like mine is R600. I'll give the os radeon driver with Amnesia next time, before hampering my system for catalyst 13.1 legacy.

I was just running Amnesia perfectly fine on my Diamond Radeon HD 4670 last night with R600g.

[Bucic]

I was just running Amnesia perfectly fine on my Diamond Radeon HD 4670 last night with R600g.

I know it's possible but keep in mind my card is 3650. For me going wit oss drivers may end up in an FPS drop from 20 to 15, compared to Catalyst. That's just a drop from 'barely playable' to 'non-playable'.

[Rallos Zek]

Painkiller Developers do not know how write graphics code it seems. Nearly every time one blames Catalyst for being buggy its the user land code in this case Painkiller itself that is a mess of buggy code not the driver. AMD catalyst likes clean OpenGL spec code, if you use non standard OpenGL code than catalyst will mess up. Nvidia does the wrong thing and lets one write buggy OpenGL code that works with their driver.

Hence why wine sucks on catalyst is cause wine devs target Nvidia hardware because they do not know how write proper code.

Developers stop writing bad code and blaming drivers.

[johnc]

Painkiller Developers do not know how write graphics code it seems. Nearly every time one blames Catalyst for being buggy its the user land code in this case Painkiller itself that is a mess of buggy code not the driver. AMD catalyst likes clean OpenGL spec code, if you use non standard OpenGL code than catalyst will mess up. Nvidia does the wrong thing and lets one write buggy OpenGL code that works with their driver.

Hence why wine sucks on catalyst is cause wine devs target Nvidia hardware because they do not know how write proper code.

Developers stop writing bad code and blaming drivers.

What in the WINE code is not proper OpenGL?

[MWisBest]

What in the WINE code is not proper OpenGL?

Believe it or not, Rallos is correct. From what I've seen not many people on this forum are even slightly experienced with OpenGL (not including people who actually contribute code to Mesa and open-source GPU drivers and whatnot of course, but those aren't the people in here trolling that I'm mostly addressing)... now I'm not claiming to be an expert by any means, but with the knowledge I have I can tell you that Nvidia drivers allow some ridiculously stupid non-compliant (non-compliant meaning not following the OpenGL published specification to the letter) OpenGL code to run, which then causes headaches for those developers who actually put their time into making sure all the details in the OpenGL spec is followed like they should be. You then have your developers using Nvidia and Nvidia drivers only for development and testing and then blame AMD's drivers for all the issues in the developer's program, when really it's either Nvidia's or that developer's fault and not the back-asswards way everybody seems to think.

I believe there was one developer who goofed up in a GLSL file and didn't put the GLSL version at the very top of the file like they were supposed to (it might not have been the version, but it was something along these lines) as it is supposed to be done according to OpenGL spec. Nvidia's drivers didn't have a problem running this malformed code, but AMD's drivers complained about it as they are supposed to. We're even seeing crap like this with LLVM/Clang vs. GCC, where GCC will have no problem building a program that doesn't follow the spec but Clang will complain about it telling the developer to fix their fucked up code (more or less...). However, it seems people are more accepting and understanding of why Clang does that and people have made effort to get everything complaint and compiling correctly with Clang, whereas we're seeing the exact opposite with the Nvidia situation that nobody seems to know or care about. Oh, long-story short, I think that developer was too arrogant to make any correction to his code when it was pointed out and instead blamed AMD since it worked fine for Nvidia so apparently it should have no trouble with AMD either then.

What we need is for Mesa to keep upping it's OpenGL spec implementation, and then have that as a "base" of sorts for developers to test their code on via just a CPU-based renderer. Sure, that's not going to be fast to use all the time when testing code, but when a rendering engine is being finalized or something, run it through a "generic" OpenGL sorta thing rather than a more vendor-specific implementation?

Mind you, this is just my view and opinion. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, and I'd be happy to debate back and forth on something, but not when it goes downhill into a hostile argument.