The Good & Bad OpenGL Drivers On Linux

What are the best and worst Linux OpenGL graphics drivers from a game developer's perspective? Here's some feedback from one open-source game project.

The Dolphin Emulator project, which just released Dolphin 4.0, supports running Nintendo GameCube and Wii games under Linux. The 4.0 update was huge with more than 2,500 changes and their developers have shared the best and worst Linux OpenGL graphics drivers from their support perspective.

Coming in with the only "excellent" rating for OpenGL drivers from the Dolphin Emulator perspective was NVIDIA's binary blob. This is hardly a surprise as the NVIDIA binary driver tends to offer the best performance and feature-set on Linux and is on par with NVIDIA's WIndows driver. The only gripes they have with the NVIDIA blob is no support for client side buffer storage until the driver's latest blob, NVIDIA's Graphics SDK license being incompatible with the GPL, and getting support or technical answers is difficult.

With a "good" rating was the Mesa driver stack but there's a few bugs and performance issues.

AMD's Linux OpenGL driver has a "medicore" rating with "A lot of issues that do not happen on Windows are present on Linux, sometimes with a very visible effect in our emulator."

Coming in with "bad" Linux OpenGL support is ARM's Mali graphics hardware and their driver. Lastly, Qualcomm's Adreno driver for its OpenGL status from the Dolphin perspective has a "horrible" rating with numerous issues occurring.

Find out more thoughts on the OpenGL driver situation on the Dolphin Emulator blog.