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

[duby229]

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.

It's still more complicated than that. Implementing GL extensions is only part of it. The harder part is dealing with ll the non-standard behavior that exists. I would agree with 2017, but I do think it'll take longer to get workarounds in place.

EDIT: And that's something that will have to be kept up every game release.

[jrch2k8]

Well i agree there is something weird very very weird in the benchmarks this time, my radeon r9-280 3Gb(rebranded 7950) in metro redux, last light, team fortress is a freaking lot faster , in some cases up to 3x the Michael numbers

metro 2033 redux 45-68fps (Moscow map)(i hate those werewolfs) everything topped except SSAA at 1080p
metro 2033 last light first level(haven't played too much since i haven't beat the regular) 38-59 fps everything topped except SSAA at 1080p
Team fortress 2, almost constant 100 +fps, (haven't tested latest maps) everything topped including 8x MSAA at 1080p
The Witcher 2(i know is not in the article just for reference) 18/25-50 fps with ubersampling and everything ultra(ubersampling really punish minimals and doesn't worth it) at 1080p
Outlast (i know is not in the article just for reference) 45-70 fps all topped at 1080p(i love this game )

considering that my CPU is a heck lot weaker (AMD FX 6100 at default clock) than Michael's, i believe either Arch is doing something magical or this benchmarks modes are doing something different with the engine that is not reflected on gameplay mode.

I'm not criticising Michael or arming any sort of conspiracy theory but maybe this could be a nice investigation project for him(for tips and stuff) because i've only seen less than 30fps in metro when using my old 7770(Cape Verde) card and that was when you have to merge the patches and compile mesa by hand(tessellation and the others for mesa 10)

[dungeon]

Michael's articles have really increased in interrest since he benchmarks "modern" games.

Who care if Xonotic runs at 360 or 420fps really?
=> duby229 and dungeon when the OSS is onpar with catalyst

Depends, maybe iGPU people care those does not go that high on any resoultion... also Xonotic is still usable to test cards on 4K resolution, etc.

See how R9 285 clearly show it is faster GPU then GTX 960 ... higher resolutions show it more clearly, even R290 beats GTX 980

http://openbenchmarking.org/prospect...3cc15b24c91379

[hahahafr]

No Dota 2 test? Such a shame, it runs on the Source 2 engine.

[Michael]

No Dota 2 test? Such a shame, it runs on the Source 2 engine.

its timed demo mode for Benchmarking isn't working...

[raonlinux]

its timed demo mode for Benchmarking isn't working...

Yes the problem with Dota 2 is that you record a demo yourself, for some reason when you update the client for some reason the demo is stop working. Well at less happen to me one time with the reborn.

[moilami]

An interesting article.

[profoundWHALE]

Personally, I had to bring down the resolution of Bioshock: Infinite to 720p and almost all of the settings at the lowest possible to make it playable with OSS. I beat the whole game like that and since I had a 120GB SSD, I deleted the files, so I never tried that page/pool size fix for the UE 3 games.

Insurgency runs anywhere between 20 fps to 130+ fps on OSS.

[Michael]

Yes the problem with Dota 2 is that you record a demo yourself, for some reason when you update the client for some reason the demo is stop working. Well at less happen to me one time with the reborn.

That happens with all Source Engine games is that the demos routinely break with new updates as shaders change, etc..... But the issue I have is that I can't get the timedemoquit functionality working right from start-up to begin with, although from the in-game console it works.

[bibaheu]

I tried Insurgency in my 290x (Arch Linux), it runs over 60 in some maps, but in others (the ones with big open spaces) it can drop to less than 20. This is with everything maxed out.

Borderlands 2 has the same problem, but it only drops to 35-40 when a lot of stuff is going on. But most of the time is locked at 60fps. Again, all graphical settings maxed out at 1080p.

I suppose Mesa has high-cost draw calls, and the CPU can't keep up. The GPU doesn't heat up much (very silent too) in Linux, while in Windows is like a plane ready to take off... the reference cooler of my 290x is quite bad in that.