July 2011 Open-Source Graphics Driver Comparison

[phoronix]

Phoronix: July 2011 Open-Source Graphics Driver Comparison

Following last week's benchmarks of Intel's New Sandy Bridge Acceleration architecture with the very latest open-source driver code, it was decided to throw a few NVIDIA and ATI/AMD graphics cards into the mix to see where the open-source driver performance is comparatively at for some other hardware. This article presents these Linux graphics results for eight configurations.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=16248

[pingufunkybeat]

The GeForce 9500GT had a surprisingly strong lead over the competition when it came to running OpenArena, which may be due in part to the Nouveau driver not dealing with waiting for swap buffers and the other "features" of the Radeon driver.

So swap buffers were on again for radeon cards?

And why were all radeons were capped to vsync, and other cards were not? Because that's the default? "Surprising lead" indeed....

I'm looking forward to the proper set of tests.

[curaga]

Curious how much the 5450 loses to 4550, they are near identical cards except for DDR2 vs DDR3. One would think at the low-end bandwidth wouldn't play that big a part.

[patstew]

It would be interesting to also have a graph showing results as a fraction of the blob results, so the hardware differences were eliminated (as much as is possible). Then we could see how the open source drivers compare to each other, and how well they drive different hardware generations.

[elanthis]

Curious how much the 5450 loses to 4550, they are near identical cards except for DDR2 vs DDR3. One would think at the low-end bandwidth wouldn't play that big a part.

Bandwidth is a pretty huge issue everywhere, honestly. Even low-end GPUs have processing power that can do an awful lot of computations in the time it takes to do even a single simple memory fetch.

It's actually pretty hard to saturate a modern GPU's processing power (that is, not Intel) compared to how easy it is to saturate the GPU's bandwidth.

[darkbasic]

Did you apply xorg patches? Otherwise it's useless to test sna...
You got 19.66 fps in nexuiz, I got 25,46 fps.
You got 47,68 fps in openarena, I got 98,50 fps.
You got 43.4 fps in world of padman, I got 114,13 fps. 3x!
http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1...DARK-THEBIGO11

[Shining Arcanine]

Did you apply xorg patches? Otherwise it's useless to test sna...
You got 19.66 fps in nexuiz, I got 25,46 fps.
You got 47,68 fps in openarena, I got 98,50 fps.
You got 43.4 fps in world of padman, I got 114,13 fps. 3x!
http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1...DARK-THEBIGO11

What patches? I use Gentoo Linux. Are they in the portage tree?

[darkbasic]

No, they aren't. You will have to apply 8 patches to the xorg-server-9999 ebuild.
If you have an old chip like GM45 the boost will be even greater with sna!
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39261
Be aware that some bugs may bite

[RealNC]

These are very important benchmarks. This way we can see whether the OSS radeon drivers, with the support and documentation they get from AMD, are indeed better than the Nouveau one, which gets no support from NVidia.

[pingufunkybeat]

These are very important benchmarks. This way we can see whether the OSS radeon drivers, with the support and documentation they get from AMD, are indeed better than the Nouveau one, which gets no support from NVidia.

In theory, yes.

In practice, they only show whether nouveau is faster than 60Hz, since all radeon tests are capped at 60Hz.