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

[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

[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)

[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.

[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.

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.

[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.

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]

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.

[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.

[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.