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Yay for open source driversYay for open source driversPosted Jul 24, 2012 2:52 UTC (Tue) by bjacob (subscriber, #58566)Parent article: Romanick: The zombies cometh...
Working on WebGL at Mozilla, I can second that open source drivers are inherently much more developer-friendly than closed-source ones. Any driver will crash, and work-arounds will have to be found, and open source drivers give right away two large advantages: 1) good stack traces 2) the possibility to look at the code.
I'd also like to add that open source drivers are the ones that have seen the most rapid quality improvements in the recent past. All the significant bugs we file against drivers @freedesktop.org get fixed within a few months and due to the quick distro updates, bugs don't stay around in the wild forever like they do on other platforms. That's why desktop Linux is now the platform where we see the highest WebGL initialization (blacklist) success rates, above 70%. This is in sharp contrast with the situation just two years ago when the idea of running WebGL on open source drivers was unrealistic.
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Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 3:05 UTC (Tue) by scientes (guest, #83068) [Link]
and the non-free drivers like fglrx even get selectively blacklisted for security-eyebrow-wondering (and no easy way to know) crashes....
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 3:06 UTC (Tue) by scientes (guest, #83068) [Link]
* this is with 2.6.32 + firefox + fglrx
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 8:00 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
I have no idea why people still insist on punishing themselves with the catalyst drives. Sure they look better in benchmarks then the open source drivers, but in every other aspect they are easily the worst possible video drivers available for Linux. VERY EASILY THE WORST. Terrible stability and terrible application compatibility.
fglrx needs to burn at the stake.
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 9:29 UTC (Tue) by moltonel (guest, #45207) [Link]
As long as you're not doing any demanding 3D (games), you're fine. But sadly for some titles, the 30x speed difference makes the free drivers a no-go. I learned this the hard way when trying to play Skyrim and grudgingly had to switch to fglrx.
It would be great if changing between the two drivers didn't involve as much config file changes and a reboot (module unload doesn't seem to be enough). That way I'd use the free drivers most of the time, and only switch to catalyst when the need to swing a beautifully-rendered magical axe arises.
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 9:43 UTC (Tue) by gidoca (subscriber, #62438) [Link] Even better would be if we could have both the free and non-free driver loaded simultaneously and just use either libGL implementation selectively. One can always dream…
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 9:53 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
That sounds more like a nightmare.
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 25, 2012 15:52 UTC (Wed) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
At least in the Windows world, there are ways to run discrete + integrated GPUs at the same time, with some software that effectively virtualises them. The idea is to use integrated GPU most of the time, and fire up the discrete GPU only when there's a demanding 3D game or other application.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4199/lucids-virtu-enables-s... - one example, I think MacOS X does something similar.
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 9:55 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> As long as you're not doing any demanding 3D (games), you're fine. But sadly for some titles, the 30x speed difference makes the free drivers a no-go. I learned this the hard way when trying to play Skyrim and grudgingly had to switch to fglrx.
If I need to run fglrx to run games then I am not running those games.
Destroying my Linux desktop for the sake of a video game is a no-go. I need my system for more serious things.
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 14:59 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
Why waste money on powerful discrete graphics hardware if you don't need the power it provides?
If you don't need a powerful GPU, it makes much more sense to stick with some properly-supported Intel GPU than to pay extra for a load of silicon which you then proceed not to use - especially since buying it sends a (financial) signal that the status quo is just fine.
(I'm guessing that in many cases the answer is dual-booting)
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 15:28 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Why waste money on powerful discrete graphics hardware if you don't need the power it provides?
The answer is to use open source drivers. I have found that depending on what I am doing I can actually get better or on par performance with anything from catalyst drivers.
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 16:06 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>The answer is to use open source drivers. I have found that depending on what I am doing I can actually get better or on par performance with anything from catalyst drivers.
Ah, so you're saying that the cited speed reduction is actually only applicable to certain operations which you happen not to need, and in other cases you're able to use the device to its potential?
(I don't have any first-hand experience of these drivers; I'm just working on the basis that I keep reading complaints about the speed of the OSS drivers)
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 16:58 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Ah, so you're saying that the cited speed reduction is actually only applicable to certain operations which you happen not to need, and in other cases you're able to use the device to its potential?
Fglrx have optimized code paths for specific usage patterns from specific gaming engines. If you are looking at benchmarks were you are dealing with older popular proprietary gaming engines then the catalyst drivers will have very significant performance advantages over the open source drivers. It would not be unusual to see performance advantages as more then 3:1.
On engines that fglrx was not optimized for then you won't see anything like that. They will generally still be faster, but there are times when OSS driver will beat the newer one.
In general day-to-day usage the open source drivers are superior on all counts. Gnome-shell works fine. Crashes are rear. Compatibility with games and applications are superior.
> (I don't have any first-hand experience of these drivers; I'm just working on the basis that I keep reading complaints about the speed of the OSS drivers)
I really don't understand it, but I guess unless people are running something that looks good in benchmarks then they not as much of a man or something like that. Then there is a intense sense of unjustified self entitlement.
There is a very loud contingent of users that have the belief that they bitch hard enough and loud enough about AMD and abuse AMD employees every time they say something on the internet then AMD will break down and be forced to make perfect drivers for them. They see that Nvidia has fast drivers that are fairly stable and don't understand why AMD can't be the same way.
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 17:30 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
That's wrong. Fglrx _is_ faster because it's much MUCH more sophisticated than open source drivers. Oh, and fglrx also supports OpenGL 4.x, while Mesa is still stuck at OpenGL 3.0 (it might get to OpenGL 3.3 by the end of the year).
Phoronix regularly compares fglrx against the open source drivers. Fglrx almost always wins on rather generic benchmarks.
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 17:52 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
No it's right because I've actually used it and compared it on my own machine.
Not only did fglrx crash more often, was a pain in the ass to install, it broke my desktop, and performance of starcraft in wine was miserable. Graphic glitches and poor performance. OSS worked much better.
IMHO; if you are planning on running proprietary drivers to get good performance you are a moron if you buy AMD.
I run AMD because I want open source drivers and something that is faster then Intel.
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 19:53 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
I actually worked with a company running fglrx on Linux desktops. They had (and still have) a constant stream of complaints about bugs and glitches and general instability.
Yet they persist because OpenSource drivers are not yet up to speed with the proprietary ones. It's not uncommon to have 2-10 times speed difference between them.
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 20:08 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Yeah. Unfortunately it's a bad situation.
If it was up to me AMD would drop catalyst altogether and pool their effort into the OSS drivers.
But I understand that isn't going to happen because they need to maintain competitive performance with Nvidia for the people that use it on professional graphical workstations. It simply will take too long for OSS drivers to catch up.
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 27, 2012 13:41 UTC (Fri) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
AMD should licence all their code in the drivers as BSD or GPL or whatever, and then sort out with their suppliers to supply the drivers under NDA.
I would have thought there would be a decent number of developers - either true open source guys, or games company guys like here, who would be prepared to sign the NDA and then (because the AMD code wouldn't be covered by the NDA) leak code or design into the Open Source drivers.
And just in case anyone misunderstands me, what I'm suggesting is perfectly legit - developers can get hold of the driver source under NDA (to protect AMD's suppliers) but can't release THAT source on. They're free to release on any AMD code, or read the drivers to find out what they actually do (and then re-implement it as free code).
Cheers,
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 18:41 UTC (Tue) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]
It's not just older games. The example cited above (Skyrim) is about 6 months old. Linux is still catching up to years of optimizations in a very specific usage pattern. Look at it this way, hardware accelerated 3D gaming on Windows has been around since about the first voodoo chipset in 1997ish. That gives roughly 15 years head start in figuring out (and tailoring hardware) to Windows to more optimize code paths and drivers for the specific work loads on these systems. It's also possible that windows bugs are addressed directly in hardware making it even harder to optimize free drivers to this moving target.
You are also dealing with the situation that because of contractual relationships AMD and Intel have failed to divulge information about the hardware (the Digital rights management code paths, etc).
It going to take time for Linux drivers to catch up and optimize for code paths that have dominated on other platforms. I personally don't understand why everyone expects Linux to catch up to Windows 15 year head start in a year or two (I totally agree that blaming AMD is just wrong). Even if driver development is going twice as fast its going to take half a decade to catch up (and that's if Windows is standing still, which it's not).
Until there is a real drive by manufacturers and game developers to target Linux this is race that Linux will have a hard time winning. That's why what Valve is doing is so interesting. If they successfully bring a Steam console to market running Linux the community will have its first major commercial effort (where hardware and software companies are interested in full optimizations) to improve gaming on Linux. Not only that but such a console could drive Linux adoption.
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 21:13 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
I'm not sure I agree with some of the premises of your argument, 3D on Linux has been around just as long as on Windows if not longer and has been the same amount of time to work on it so there is no head start. There have also been several generations of hardware and software in that time frame. I'm not sure your comparisons here are of equivalent things.
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 22:41 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Linux has hardly been used as a gaming platform. As a result, Linux drivers had stagnated for too long. NVidia and ATI were only interested in high-end CAD workstation markets, certainly not in Linux gaming.
With open source drivers it's even worse. For example, DRM2 and KMS were introduced after Windows Vista came out with its new driver model and DirectX10. Mesa has achieved OpenGL3 compliance only earlier this year.
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 22:26 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
> Why waste money on powerful discrete graphics hardware if you don't need the power it provides?
because you can't buy a not-powerful discrete graphics hardware options?
The only on-board option that has full open support is a subset of what Intel offers, and unless you are going to buy an Intel motherboard and CPU, you can't use it.
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 25, 2012 7:54 UTC (Wed) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]
> because you can't buy a not-powerful discrete graphics hardware options?
I'm not sure that's true. I have a Radeon card (HD 5450, I think) which I bought specifically because it has passive cooling - and was cheap. I wouldn't call anything with passive cooling "powerful", although it's definitely much more powerful than the crappy IGP I have on my (several years old) motherboard. I still have to objectively determine its performance though, and that's why I'm not sure :)
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 25, 2012 18:52 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
but if you are buying a Radeon card at all you are being defined as someone buying a "powerful discrete graphics card" that runs so much better with the proprietary drivers that there's no point in having such a powerful card and then wasting it's power
(end of sarcasam)
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 26, 2012 13:20 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
No need to be a dick about it.
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 27, 2012 7:59 UTC (Fri) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]
> but if you are buying a Radeon card at all you are being defined as someone buying a "powerful discrete graphics card"
Well, some people forget that the graphics card manufacturers have an entire lineup of cards, from the very-low-end to extreme-enthusiast-high-end. This particular chip is (I think?) marketed as an HTPC thing that is good for decoding video but not much else. It works well enough for its stated purpose on my Debian system with free drivers, and I'm never going back to fglrx.
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 27, 2012 8:02 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
you missed the sarcasm in my reply, I should have made it clearer.
In some people's view (and I believe in the view of the poster a few levels up who asked the question), anyone buying a separate card for their machine is by definition buying a 'performance' option
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 27, 2012 12:27 UTC (Fri) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]
> you missed the sarcasm in my reply, I should have made it clearer.
Actually I didn't as it was very explicit ;)
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 25, 2012 10:01 UTC (Wed) by etienne (subscriber, #25256) [Link]
> Why waste money on powerful discrete graphics hardware if you don't need the power it provides?
I also do not use any graphic animations/mathematically described screen, so totally agree.
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 12:42 UTC (Tue) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]
Do not waste time with the fglrx drivers: in 6 months, the new version will stop supporting your card anyway, so why bother... Another advantage of open source drivers.
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 15:57 UTC (Tue) by moltonel (guest, #45207) [Link]
I'm all for free drivers. My systems are as free as possible. I keep an up-to-date graphics stack and rport bugs. I voted "AMD" with my wallet because they behave better than Nvidia (Intel GPUs don't provide enough power, even though the one integrated in my i7 CPU is very niffty). I've resisted reinstalling fglrx for a long time. But for this particular use-case, the free drivers are simply not an option.
So if fglrx drops support for my card tomorrow, I won't be able to play that game (and many others) anymore (or rather, I'll boot into an old kernel/distro, which is still better than booting into Windows). Cool that I got to play for a while, I guess ? What I'm actually hoping is that the free drivers will have caught up by then, but in the meantime I dont fancy restricting myself to low-spec games only.
Yay for open source drivers Posted Jul 24, 2012 12:33 UTC (Tue) by bjacob (subscriber, #58566) [Link]
Indeed, FGLRX on the specific 2.6.32 version of the Linux kernel is blacklisted for possibly security-sensitive crashes. This is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=724640 . As the drivers are closed source, it's very hard for us to assess how security-critical this kind of driver crash is, so we have to be slightly paranoid.
That being, said, to stop the FGLRX-bashing below: the most recent versions of the FGLRX drivers (since a few months) on very recent Linux kernels work very well (pass almost all WebGL conformance tests, no crashes anymore).
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