Half-Life 2 On Wine Is Faster On AMD R600g Over Catalyst

I'm surprised that blizzard games aren't in there. I do believe all 3 current blizzard games are the most played ones, if not the world, at least under Linux?

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Originally Posted by crazycheese

"As far as why the open-source driver is outperforming the highly optimized closed-source driver, Stefan wrote, "I don't have an explanation for this yet, especially considering that fglrx beats r600g by a factor of 5 in most of your Linux-native tests. A possible cause is that my test setup is heavily CPU limited (usually 800x600 resolution, no multisampling). This was a conscious decision when I set up the tests because Wine's main performance issues are on the CPU side, not the GPU side. However, at least r300g's main problems seem to be GPU-related (not sure about r600g).""

Unless he means, WINE has CPU issues when using AMD drivers, I disagree. WINE had no CPU bottlenecks in all games I played (NOLF2 and stuff).
Still, even with 800x600 this shows open driver has no resolution-associated CPU issues, which is good.
Running 1920 parallel would be good though, even if opensource looses.

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I think he might be refereing to that Wine it self dosn't do a lot in GPU space so optimizations are focused on CPU and there for his test is also set to mainly stress CPU bound functions.

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Originally Posted by Gusar

Which boggles my mind completely. Because I don't see howcould've been written any clearer.

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Ha, yeah, I think what you're seeing here is a bunch of people who glanced through at the charts without reading the text beforehand.

The charts on their own were a little confusing if you didn't bother reading the explanation.

That would explain a lot of the comments on phoronix in general.

Then again, it's somewhat understandable that people don't read the text, because it's usually a pageful of filler crap and self-promotion.

So in a CPU limited test, the driver with less CPU intensive shader optimizations wins? Surprise.

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Originally Posted by Drago

I doubt that. r600g doesn't have a shader optimizer, how possibly it can beat Catalyst?

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Not exactly true. r600g uses the common shader optimizations, which are part of the glsl compiler. Only the hardware-specific optimizations are missing.

Also, if the bottleneck is on the CPU, the speed of the GPU usually doesn't matter.

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Originally Posted by rohcQaH

So in a CPU limited test, the driver with less CPU intensive shader optimizations wins? Surprise.

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Shader optimizations have nothing to do with this. Shaders are usually NOT compiled in the middle of rendering (if they were, there would be stuttering).