Nouveau's OpenGL Performance Approaches The NVIDIA Driver

[bug77]

Seriously, what does it take to realize open source video drivers will not happen?

After years of trying, even with (some) support from AMD, no open source video driver can compete with the real thing. Nor does anyone have a plan to get there. All the community can do is play catch-up and that's all they do.
Sure, it's fun to work on a video driver. There's tons of stuff to learn from that.

But wake up and see the writing on the wall: not one project has delivered.

[Drago]

Seriously, what does it take to realize open source video drivers will not happen?

After years of trying, even with (some) support from AMD, no open source video driver can compete with the real thing. Nor does anyone have a plan to get there. All the community can do is play catch-up and that's all they do.
Sure, it's fun to work on a video driver. There's tons of stuff to learn from that.

But wake up and see the writing on the wall: not one project has delivered.

You know, they used to say the same for the operating systems. Guess what...

[BlackStar]

Seriously, what does it take to realize open source video drivers will not happen?

After years of trying, even with (some) support from AMD, no open source video driver can compete with the real thing. Nor does anyone have a plan to get there. All the community can do is play catch-up and that's all they do.
Sure, it's fun to work on a video driver. There's tons of stuff to learn from that.

But wake up and see the writing on the wall: not one project has delivered.

As a happy R600 user, I can tell you you are completely mistaken.

[runeks]

As a happy R600 user, I can tell you you are completely mistaken.

+1

I'm with Ted Ts'o on this one:

I'm old school, which means job #1 for file systems and video drivers is that they don't lose data and they don't cause your system to crash. It's not about "number of file system features", or "hundreds of FPS when playing game X".

(1)

r600g does this way better for me than fglrx. I have no experience with Nvidia in Linux.

[curaga]

@Michael

Light green on white (or vice versa) is not really readable, perhaps add some if-dark-bg-then-white-text-else-black-text logic?

[HangFire]

If the xorg.conf was modified, of course.

I've been running nouveau for a couple of months now on Gentoo/9800GT Low Power, it does everything I need for a desktop (KDE effects, video). I haven't tried video games yet. Very stable and plenty fast enough for desktop use.

What amuses me was that Nouveau was labeled "Beta" and Unstable all over the place, and works fine, while the production Radeon drivers crashed KDE all over the place for the past year with both an HD4250 and an HD4290- in multiple distro's.

[mendieta]

The most telling part is one comment in that thread that points out that nouveau doesn't support things like AA/AF but the tests include them. So while the binary nvidia driver is rendering everything beautifully with all available features, the open source version is pushing out a haggard shell of a render. That would give it a substancial speed boost. Benchmarks need to be like-for-like.

Ah, that explains a lot, because up until not long ago, noveau was just doing baby steps, it seems just too good to see them pick up so fast, particularly in contrast with the much more mature ATI OS efforts.

Michael, if this is the case, could you please update the original report with at least a warning/caveat? I agree with Oliw that these things hurt credibility (even when there is certainly no evil intention on your part) ...

Thanks!

[NSLW]

Seriously, what does it take to realize open source video drivers will not happen?

After years of trying, even with (some) support from AMD, no open source video driver can compete with the real thing. Nor does anyone have a plan to get there. All the community can do is play catch-up and that's all they do.
Sure, it's fun to work on a video driver. There's tons of stuff to learn from that.

But wake up and see the writing on the wall: not one project has delivered.

I must disagree with you. I'm happy with r300g driver on r500 hardware. I only wish that the performance in wine games was better.

[devius]

Seriously, what does it take to realize open source video drivers will not happen?

I seem to recall that same sentence being used to talk about a lot of things that are real today, like automobiles, airplanes, telephones, wireless telephones, radio, internet, reaching India by sea, etc...

[Michael]

Michael, if this is the case, could you please update the original report with at least a warning/caveat? I agree with Oliw that these things hurt credibility (even when there is certainly no evil intention on your part) ...

Thanks!

At last check the Nexuiz configuration didn't use AA/AF. That'd be the only test profile where its performance comes into question. Will check in on it. The ioquake3 games, etc don't use AA/AF/any other advanced rendering features.