Valve & Intel Work On Open-Source GPU Drivers

[AJSB]

Compiz, a hog resource? Wow, are you kidding me?
I've been running Compiz with proprietary drivers from Nvidia and Open Source drivers from Intel, never had any problems with it being a "hog resource".

Do people have computers from 1990 or what? Seriously. In 2006, I had a school project and one of the things I did was playing around with Compiz/Compiz Fusion/Beryl on Ubuntu with AMD open source drivers. The graphic card that was used was quite old. I never had problems with getting it to run - and it ran smooth.

You can say whatever you want but a computer feels always more responsive with all that type of ....well....visual c**p disabled.

No matter the PC, no matter the OS, i always disable all that kind of stuff.

[Figueiredo]

Can Wayland/Weston help fixing this?

[89c51]

Can Wayland/Weston help fixing this?

If the problem is in the drivers then wayland is going to have the same problems AFAIK.

[Figueiredo]

If the problem is in the drivers then wayland is going to have the same problems AFAIK.

And if the binary drivers don't support Wayland then I gess the problem is solved...

[narciso]

And if the binary drivers don't support Wayland then I gess the problem is solved...

I think both AMD and Nvidia will support it if they think it's worth it, and not just another vapourware.

[jmcharron]

Valve is targeting their Steam support for Ubuntu, but Ubuntu Unity base is Compiz. Compiz should die, because it's the only reason why gaming performance in Ubuntu sucks.

I've tried everything and I can't get a smooth gaming experience with Ubuntu while running Unity3d, everything is laggy and stuttery including games and desktop experience itself. As soon as I switch to Ubuntu2d I get my performance back, but not everything is perfect because Vsync doesn't completely eliminate tearing.

I use OpenSuSE 12.1 here and had performance issues and a general distaste for KDE4 with plasma so I switched to KDE 3.5.10 from the build service. All though its starting to show its age a little bit, the build service does a great job of keeping everything from going stale.

I'm running a Sandybridge 2600k + P67 mobo + 2 x nvidia Gtx680 + 8 Gb on a 240Gb SSD, and Ubuntu 12.04 gaming experience sucks compared to Windows.

Also, SLI in linux is unusable because it only hurts performance instead of improving it, so I have it disabled.

I feel your pain, I have experimented with SLI on Linux a couple times and claiming Nvidia has SLI support for Linux is kind of a Joke! I had two 8800GTXs in sli and it worked* but I only gained a 10%-15% fps not anywhere near how they scaled in Windows. Then I had two 465GTX's and SLI made everything all sorts of unstable and performance was abysmal so I went back to using a single card.

I'm running AMD Phenom II x6 1100t - 4gigs Ram - 670GTX - Twin 150g VelociRaptor in Raid 0 + Twin 60gb Intel 330 Series SSDs in Raid 0 on OpenSuSE 12.1

Just as Nvidia removed support for overclocking from their drivers on Fermi and Kepler cards, I think they let what little support for SLI that was there deprecate. I hope RandR 1.5 can improve SLI Linux support but I could be completely wrong about that....

[89c51]

I think both AMD and Nvidia will support it if they think it's worth it, and not just another vapourware.

With Intel backing it and Canonical implementing it (plus other companies and organizations) you wouldn't characterize it as Vapourware. All toolkits work, client side decorations are being worked on, mozilla libre and other apps have their own set of problems but we are getting there.


On topic i was really hoping that bridgman would chime in and bring some good news regarding the whole valve thing.

[asdx]

It's pretty depressing that we have Valve porting Steam and that our open source drivers are crap (in 3d performance)

Valve will probably realize this and cancel/abandon the project after they realize no hardware vendors give a fuck about our drivers and Linux.

It's incredibly depressing and sad.

[89c51]

It's pretty depressing that we have Valve porting Steam and that our open source drivers are crap (in 3d performance)

Valve will probably realize this and cancel/abandon the project after they realize no hardware vendors give a fuck about our drivers and Linux.

It's incredibly depressing and sad.

Drivers exist. They are just closed source. If valve cant force nVidia and AMD to help (nvidia mostly amd is helpful but needs more devs) i am pretty sure they will support the blobs.

[Figueiredo]

It's pretty depressing that we have Valve porting Steam and that our open source drivers are crap (in 3d performance)

Valve will probably realize this and cancel/abandon the project after they realize no hardware vendors give a fuck about our drivers and Linux.

It's incredibly depressing and sad.

I think the open drivers are the best thing GNU/Linux has over other consumer platforms. The drivers are a core part of the OS, differently from any other OS which requirers each hardware manufacturer to write the whole driver from scrach. What this means is that hardware manufacturers who decide to support the platform in the future will only have to write their hardware specific bits. Look at the mess closed drivers have made on android. Device manufacturers must wait SoC manufacturers write new drivers to support new versions of the OS. Imagine if google required that anyone entering the android bandwagon implemented an open source driver... what a wasted oportunity. Google could have bought the important patents (or tried to) and licensed among the android manufacturers. It sure as hell would have made the updates a hole lot faster.

If/when mesa/gallium are developed enough, it shouldn't be such a hassle to suport new hardware, and software updates will simply be there. It's just a shame that only Intel takes this seriously.

I'm eager to have a Valley View phone, should be the best hardware to receive updates. Hell, should even be able to install different OSes in it. Supporting Firefox OS, Ubuntu phone, WebOS, besides android should be fairly simple (all linux based). The other closed source driver makers, should learn or fade into obscurity. It would be kickass if intel implement coreboot on their VV phones and tablets too.