Yay for open source drivers [LWN.net]

Yay for open source drivers

Posted Jul 24, 2012 17:30 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Yay for open source drivers by drag
Parent article: Romanick: The zombies cometh...

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.

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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,
Wol