Packard on the state of Linux graphics

I think that overal the Intel driver is going to provide better stability and better long-term support. Not right now... but if your using something like Debian stable which uses the pre-GEM stuff.. or Fedora 11 which will use the post-GEM stuff.. then it'll be better.

The ATI stuff will provide better long-term support also. The open source OpenGL drivers still work fine with R200 era hardware... which is something that can't be said with proprietary Nvidia drivers which only do support for hardware sold in the last few years and shoves the rest into 'legacy' mode were your using older drivers until they no longer work with modern Linux systems.

However if you want/need to have good top range 3D performance and good compatibility for games and applications then Nvidia is still tops. Nvidia places a very high priority on performance for their drivers and it's obvious that game developers and application developers using Linux and targetting Linux all prefer the Nvidia proprietary drivers. So it's very common to run into situations were games and applications are tested against nothing but proprietary drivers and Nvidia's proprietary OpenGL stack.

So you end up with Nvidia-isms and bugs that happen in the open source OpenGL stack go unnoticed and unfixed. It's often a frustrating experience for people relying on OSS drivers to have to go and tweak settings on their apps in order to get some sort of combination that does not cause software fallbacks or crashes or other such negative things.

There have been a couple times in the past were I've personally run into situations were developers have simply given up trying to get their stuff working well on in a pure-OSS environment. It's not that they were all ra-ra proprietary softwre or anything like that... they were generally real swear-to-god open source developers, but it's just that the combination of low quality, spotty OpenGL support, and lack of demand among end users just left getting stuff working well a low priority. I don't blame them for having that attitude. I've ran into problems related to that in both open source ATI and open source Intel drivers.

A recent example of this is going to be the YoFranky game from the Blender project.

In Fedora 10, using the Intel GMA drivers for the 965 chipset, I couldn't even play the silly thing due to the lackluster OpenGL suppport.. it wasn't that the performance wasn't decent in benchmarks and such (Fedora 10 had the fastest OpenGL in terms of raw performance that I've ran into)it's just that it wasn't compatible with a lot of applications. In many ways Fedora 11 beta offers worse performance, but the stability and compatiblity has improved to the point were I don't have to worry about running most OpenGL applications and games. Now if I disable shaders in the game I can play it on medium quality decent enough... It's still not as pleasent as it should be.

I think that right now a lot of people are complaining about Intel performance and drivers and such.. not becuase there was a sudden drop off in quality (without a doubt the current transition is a rought spot), but that the quality has reached a point were people are beginning to depend on them and now are desiring to have higher quality.