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

[F1esDgSdUTYpm0iy]

how far can the Open-Source drivers push?

How far they can be pushed, you mean? Configuration-wise -- Not very far. However, code-wise the sky is literally the limit, I would say. I am a firm believer in OSS projects and how they can be an example for commercial products; amongst chess engines, for example, the prevalent OSS product, Stockfish has a very high quality level of code that numerous commercial alternatives could learn a thing or two from in my opinion. Given enough time, the OSS driver stack has every bit the chance of being superior in every way to the commercial/closed source alternatives. As long as people do not lose interest in their development.

[lvlark]

Truthfully, the answer here would be: Depends on your needs. Because mesa11.1 with kernel 4.3 is good enough for me, currently. I have an HD 7850 and a (relatively) slim wallet and am consequently quite accepting of not having bleeding-edge performance on all the latest, most demanding titles. Victor Vran/Witcher 2/Trine 1&2 perform quite well, and I'm far from done enjoying them. Alien:Isolation/Shadow of Mordor/Ark: Survival Evolved may not even boot, so if that's your kind of thing, Open-Source is a no-go indeed.

Maybe the question isn't legit. Maybe it should be: how far can the Open-Source drivers push?

[F1esDgSdUTYpm0iy]

There might be another exponential algorithm at play in Windows Update.
Making your computer slower with each update.

Actually, I'm quite convinced it's just NTFS itself that's simply inferior. Since I've noticed this kind of performance decay in Windows 7 and up as well. Even 8.1 started slowing down for me quite rapidly, when compared to the stable performance I'm getting out of Linux (using ext4). Additionally, it's not just during updates that it's decaying performance becomes apparent and the article in question does pertain to just updating slowing down to a crawl. Good article though; yet another point in favor of just dumping Windows XP altogether.

[plonoma]

AMD. And it's not just the graphics performance that feels weaker in Windows for me; it's the whole thing. Booting is substantially slower, file performance is drastically slower (NTFS' performance really seems to decay quite hard after some time, not entirely sure why, part is fragmentation but I suspect something else is going on there as well) but, CPU performance as well seems to be weaker. Something about Windows' scheduler or something along those lines; my own C# password manager's performance is 50% - 100% better in Linux than in Windows (which is its native platform, given the fact it's C# but, still, it is faster in Linux). I have other such examples as well of software simply performing better in Linux; chess engines for example.

Last but certainly not least, Linux gave me the ability to cherry pick the kernel and the scaling governor in play. Giving me far more control over things like latency and throughput than I would have in Windows. The Liquorix kernel, for example, seems to play really nice with Wine Staging with CSMT enabled. Some minor tweaks to the exact settings of the ondemand governor and I'm looking at a machine that does not feel like it's lacking punch at all (which it obviously is, AMD does indeed leave their APUs wanting in CPU punch).

There might be another exponential algorithm at play in Windows Update.
Making your computer slower with each update.

Exponential algorithm making Windows XP miserable could be fixed
A decade of patches makes svchost.exe a very sad boy indeed.
http://arstechnica.com/information-t...ould-be-fixed/

[profoundWHALE]

Whereas it's obvious you're just trolling, I would like to respond to this remark -- For this particular machine I am using right now, without discrete GPU, Windows is the invalid platform for games. I tried, it won't let me play them properly. Too much overhead from the OS. Switched to Linux and Wine and suddenly, I'm able to play D3, HOTS and other (semi-)modern titles without too much of a hassle. On the OSS drivers no less.

While the performance will decrease while doing games like that (most of the time), I had a similar issue where I had to boot into Linux to run a game through WINE because Windows had issues somewhere, worked great on OSS drivers. Couldn't get catalyst drivers to work at the time due to some stupid dependency error forcing it to remove WINE, which is now resolved IIRC.

[haagch]

The relevant source code is in mesa-11.0.4/src/gallium/auxiliary/hud. It would be possible to add file output there.

It's actually really easy to read out, i.e. when I played a bit with it, only so little is required: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum...806#post820806
But there's a lot missing for a proper solution.
I was hoping that this discussion might not only yield input for gallium_hud, but also output of the values: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...er/098544.html

[duby229]

AMD. And it's not just the graphics performance that feels weaker in Windows for me; it's the whole thing. Booting is substantially slower, file performance is drastically slower (NTFS' performance really seems to decay quite hard after some time, not entirely sure why, part is fragmentation but I suspect something else is going on there as well) but, CPU performance as well seems to be weaker. Something about Windows' scheduler or something along those lines; my own C# password manager's performance is 50% - 100% better in Linux than in Windows (which is its native platform, given the fact it's C# but, still, it is faster in Linux). I have other such examples as well of software simply performing better in Linux; chess engines for example.

Last but certainly not least, Linux gave me the ability to cherry pick the kernel and the scaling governor in play. Giving me far more control over things like latency and throughput than I would have in Windows. The Liquorix kernel, for example, seems to play really nice with Wine Staging with CSMT enabled. Some minor tweaks to the exact settings of the ondemand governor and I'm looking at a machine that does not feel like it's lacking punch at all (which it obviously is, AMD does indeed leave their APUs wanting in CPU punch).

I think that's because linux actually tries to put loads where it would have the least amount of latency, where as windows just gives cpu time and the app has to do what it can with it. Windows is more like time slicing than scheduling.

[F1esDgSdUTYpm0iy]

Intel or AMD? Intel's Windows driver is very poor in particular, especially on the OpenGL side. AMD simply suffers from a weak CPU. OS overhead should be minimal, especially in fullscreen, unless you are loosing performance in driver-land.

AMD. And it's not just the graphics performance that feels weaker in Windows for me; it's the whole thing. Booting is substantially slower, file performance is drastically slower (NTFS' performance really seems to decay quite hard after some time, not entirely sure why, part is fragmentation but I suspect something else is going on there as well) but, CPU performance as well seems to be weaker. Something about Windows' scheduler or something along those lines; my own C# password manager's performance is 50% - 100% better in Linux than in Windows (which is its native platform, given the fact it's C# but, still, it is faster in Linux). I have other such examples as well of software simply performing better in Linux; chess engines for example.

Last but certainly not least, Linux gave me the ability to cherry pick the kernel and the scaling governor in play. Giving me far more control over things like latency and throughput than I would have in Windows. The Liquorix kernel, for example, seems to play really nice with Wine Staging with CSMT enabled. Some minor tweaks to the exact settings of the ondemand governor and I'm looking at a machine that does not feel like it's lacking punch at all (which it obviously is, AMD does indeed leave their APUs wanting in CPU punch).

[[email protected]]

that is impossible, there are too many games
in reality it is the other way around: you can play all your games on mesa
for example, my son uses windows and plays almost every day for many years. but he almost exclusively plays dota, cs and tf. and(surprise) they all can be nicely played on mesa since like forever[/FONT][/COLOR]

Well, since 2014, to be honest. I would even say Q2 2014. But that doesn't matter anymore, since those games are running fine now

[pal666]

If you want to play all new Linux games on launch-day

that is impossible, there are too many games
in reality it is the other way around: you can play all your games on mesa
for example, my son uses windows and plays almost every day for many years. but he almost exclusively plays dota, cs and tf. and(surprise) they all can be nicely played on mesa since like forever