Are The Open-Source Graphics Drivers Good Enough For Steam Linux Gaming?

[geearf]

One thing missing in this is the rendering.
How does it compare between the blobs and the oss drivers?

[Luke]

One thing remains true: Open drivers on cards that work well with them (like all of my r600 cards) are good enough for open source gaming. Even my Nvidia GTX450 (without reclocking) will deliver usable frame rates on everything I've got, including Scorched3d, 0ad, and Criticalmass/Critter. Criticalmass is an interesting case, in that it is a 2d game in opengl that should need little graphics capability-except that it tends to drop bunches of frames at once. This is so bad it has to render 300+ fps just to ensure that what actually goes on screen does not include the dropped/repeated frames.

I've said for years: free software works best with free content, do not be surprised if paid content demands paid or at least proprietary software. One machine might be able to play AAA games and watch Netflix. Another might be able to post something without the FBI being able to figure out who posted it. The same system install, possibly the same hardware, cannot do both at once. If the free Radeon driver did not exist, I would not be able to use the GPU accelerated features now under development for the kdenlive video editor.In fact, I would not even be able to run compiz without free opengl drivers.

[geearf]

Something like mesamatrix except a list of games supported instead of a list of GL extensions.

More something like winehq or dolphin's wiki, since mesamatrix is automatic and I don't see it happening for this
But yeah, that'd be nice.

[humbug]

We shouldn't restrict ourselves to talking about whether open source openGL driver performance is just barely 'good enough'.
We should indeed compare their performance on merit against the fastest openGL performance there is available (the proprietary drivers). And whether we like it or not the open source options on modern hardware get annihilated.
Don't understand why people are so keen for AMD to retire catalyst today and restrict their customer's choice / ability to game.

[raonlinux]

Don't understand why people are so keen for AMD to retire catalyst today and restrict their customer's choice / ability to game.

It's because they bring for some people instability and the main problem you won' t upgrade your kernel and xorg because of depend of bunch of things, look Ubuntu problem with fgrlx, other distro just banish them because of this. Also AMD doesn't have enough resource to be upgrading their stuff for each of xorg been update it.
Well with this amdgpu thing this driver will be update anyway what xorg you have or new release. But will let you install the part of private or mesa so let you update your system without a problem.

[ChemicalBrother]

Maybe I'm a little too tired at the moment, but I don't see any mention of DRI3 usage. I have to manually activate DRI3 in the xorg.conf. I only mention this, because I know, that the games, especially Metro 2033 Redux, run far better than in this benchmark, for me, on my 7870. The lowest fps I get in Metro 2033 are about 50 fps, even when I record the game, so the actual lowest fps I get are about 60 fps. (Here for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLesgKSatQ4 just in case: this is not a benchmark)

Michael only got 22 fps. I don't quiet get, why it is so slow for him.

[Guest]

R9 270X + RadeonSI here, Steam games work really well for me. Bought an AMD card to be able to game using OSS drivers, never had a problem, never looked back.

So... Are the Open-Source Graphics Drivers Good Enough For Steam Linux Gaming? Yes.

It is impossible to play many OpenGL4 AAA titles on Linux with open-source drivers.

System stability with Catalyst is higher than with open-source drivers.

[ChemicalBrother]

Don't understand why people are so keen for AMD to retire catalyst today and restrict their customer's choice / ability to game.

I have more problems running games with Catalyst than with radeonsi, so Catalyst is the actual restriction, not the open-source driver.

[Guest]

Who care if Xonotic runs at 360 or 420fps really?

When VSync is enabled (60 Hz typically), GPU power consumption with the theoretical 420 FPS is lower than with 360 FPS.

[plonoma]

The open source drivers have still a lot of catching up to do.
Looking at the pace of features using mesamatrix.net's feature completion dates you could make an educated guess when openGL 4.5 is reached for all modern cards.
Here is my educated guess, the open source drivers will be good enough / on par with closed source drivers for gaming in 2017.
Gaming in general including Steam Linux gaming. There isn't really a big difference between supporting all of Steam's gaming catalog and general gaming from a driver features standpoint.