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

[oliver]

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?

[AJenbo]

"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.

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.

[smitty3268]

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

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.

[AJenbo]

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

[rohcQaH]

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.

[marek]

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

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.

[marek]

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

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).