Revisiting Linux GPUs: Playing the Driver Game
by Kristopher Kubicki on December 17, 2004 12:49 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
Final Thoughts
Both next generation driver sets add significant performance increases to the ATI and NVIDIA video card lineup on Linux. Unfortunately, just looking at the list of known issues in both readme files tends to give the feeling that there is still a long way to go. NVIDIA's to-do list seems fairly mundane; most issues exist with multi-display desktops. ATI's list, while shorter, looks more menacing - "fix screen corruption problems and crashes". Granted, we did not have any errors with screen corruption or crashes on ATI drivers this time around, but we have experienced some screen corruption issues in the past. Perhaps an even greater accomplishment for both vendors today were that the performance increases in today's analysis came without any crashing or unanticipated rendering behavior.Still missing from ATI's official to-do list is 64-bit support. Not having a 64-bit driver is cutting into an ever growing portion of the Linux market share. Considering that virtually every main Linux distribution has a 64-bit branch and a 32-bit branch these days, ATI has some ground to catch up on. Virtually every new system that we recommend (and particularly on Linux) revolves around the Athlon 64 bit core. While performance gains between 32-bit and 64-bit distributions on Unreal Tournament 2004 were meager, the code base for most Linux applications has increased to the point where you won't feel any performance decreases going from 32-bit to 64-bit anymore (but that's another article for another day).
As far as measured performance goes, NVIDIA did a lot to increase their lead today. While ATI's drivers (at least in the 32-bit realm) are shaping up to make their hardware much more viable, the newest 1.0-6629 set gave us astonishing performance gains. As we saw (again) in almost every benchmark, NVIDIA continued to build their case as the vastly stronger brand on Linux hardware.
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KristopherKubicki - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
Pannenkoek: Unfortunately I have large doubts about ATI or NVIDIA ever opening up their drivers. Both companies have more software engineers than hardware engineers. They spend a *lot* of time and money reinventing the wheel between the two of them - and I think they want to keep it that way.Kristopher
KristopherKubicki - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
MooseMuffin: It's SUSE 9.1 - i think i might have a typo in there somewhere. We kept it at 9.1 instead of 9.2 just for that reason (the kernel is very updated though).Hope that helps,
Kristopher
Pannenkoek - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
I back up #5: 10-15% gain from 32bit to 64bit is not "meager"...Before you ditch the open source 3D drivers for the newer videocards (if any exist...), please keep in mind they have to reverse engineer the cards, as NVIDIA and ATI don't co-operate and no hardware spec's are available. As far as I know only serious 2D OSS drivers are in development.
Also, we should not applause ATI's gains in performance, as they were abominable to start with. However, we should applause their changing attitude towards open source platforms. Let us hope it will continue to improve!
And let us hope NVIDIA and ATI will open their hardware in the future, so open source drivers can be made for them. No buggy proprietary drivers tainting the kernel anymore. But I fear we may wait a long time for that to happen. ATI is hugging Direct3D and MS too closely to encourage development of good OSS drivers as a way to counter NVIDIA's lead in OpenGL. And NVIDIA won't open up as long as that is the case.
Nevertheless, hereby I beg NVIDIA and ATI to design their future generation cards in such a way that opening the spec will not expose their holy IP.
Myrandex - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
And that should only increase with time with optimized 64bit code, drivers, improved operating system components, etc.icarus4586 - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
...performance gains between 32-bit and 64-bit distributions on Unreal Tournament 2004 were meagerI agree with Icehawk, and beg to differ with the author. >10% performance gains are not "meager" by any stretch. Imagine NVidia/ATI releases a new Windows driver that increases performance 10%. I'm pretty sure nobody would say that was a "meager" improvement.
R3MF - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
thank god i have an nForce2 and Ti4200, SUSE 9.1 runs like a dream.i have just bought an nForce3Ultra and 6800GT for the parents.
i will upgrade to an nForce4 and 6800GT early next year.
notice a trend? you would have to be daft using ATI silicon in a machine you intend to install Linux onto.
Icehawk - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
I should say total delta from 32:32-bit to 64:64-bit .Icehawk - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
I don't know why they say the bump in 64-bit UT performance is minor - if you look at the total delta from 1.0-611 32-bit -> 1.0-6629 64-bit it is a ~13% increase on the 6800 and ~15% on the 5700U which is pretty darn good IMO.MooseMuffin - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
How did you guys get these drivers installed on Suse 9.2? As far as I can tell suse 9.2 uses xorg and ati only supplies xfree drivers.mickyb - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
ATI's performance is shameful on linux. They have some serious work to do.