Benchmarking NVIDIA's R310 Linux Driver Improvements

[AJenbo]

Why do you think is radeon oss so much better? I highly doubt that because nouveau is reverse engineered which means the driver does more or less the same as the binary one. Reclocking is however an issue but radeon does not shine in that area as well. Radeon cards tend to use a higher default clock which results in very hot laptops running on oss drivers. As radeon devs do not try to clone fglrx i doubt that the final performance will be that high. From a performance/price comparision most likely amd would win on windows - you pay usually an extra nvidia "tax" of about 10-15% over amd. It depends if you want to live with the linux drawbacks or not - at least 12.11 beta driver is a step in the right direction.

The OSS Radeon driver also analyze the command stream of fglrx to match it in cases where neede. Nouveau is not an attempt to reimplement the Nvidia driver bit for bit and both Nouveau and Radeon are using the Gallium 3D frame work. AMD has fulltime emploies working on the Radeon driver, who also havedirect access to documentation that normaly can not be obtained out side of AMD. I don't really see any thing pointing to Nouveau being more likly or performing better then the Radeon driver. Lastly Radeon does alot better for reclocing then Nouveau.

[Licaon]

Retesting (GTX460@700/3600) Unigine Heaven 3.0:
-1280×720 fullscreen
-no AA
-16x aniso.
-shaders: high
-tess: normal

Linux 304.46: 48.8 / 1230 / 12.4 / 118.0
Linux 310.14: 49.3 / 1242 / 30.1 / 117.2

Yeah 1% better... lol, ok, the minimum fps got a boost, but that needs another test, if I find the time

/LE: another 304.46 run: 49.5 / 1245 / 30.7 / 117.4 so looks like no fps boost for me after all

[pmorph]

Yeah, though my GF210 isn't intended for this kind of stuff, seems safe to say unigine demo at least doesn't get much out of those optimizations, score 258->259.

Mode: 800x600 4xAA fullscreen
Shaders: medium
Textures: high
Filter: trilinear
Anisotropy: 8x
Occlusion: enabled
Refraction: enabled
Volumetric: enabled
Tessellation: disabled

[a user]

Nevermind there's a whole article conforming nvidia's claims (for linux), haters gonna hate.

i was just asking and skeptic. statements from manufactors side especially in the graphics card world (both nvidia and ati/amd), where always exagerating. a simple "no, its third party benchmarks and not nvidias only claim" would have been enough,

this has nothing to do with haters gonna hate. but forums big mouth always have a big mouth. is it like that?

[bug77]

i was just asking and skeptic. statements from manufactors side especially in the graphics card world (both nvidia and ati/amd), where always exagerating. a simple "no, its third party benchmarks and not nvidias only claim" would have been enough,

this has nothing to do with haters gonna hate. but forums big mouth always have a big mouth. is it like that?

Well, you were posting in a thread started by an article. I assumed you read the article before posting...

[oliver]

This driver update does absolutely nothing for games through wine.

[bug77]

This driver update does absolutely nothing for games through wine.

It doesn't claim otherwise either

[scix]

This driver update does absolutely nothing for games through wine.

It depends on the game, at least as far as the threaded optimisations go. I get around a 15-20% performance increase with The Witcher 1, but I get performance losses with other games, or no change at all. CPU usage is increased from 100 to 130-160% (Witcher 1) which suggests that this option only really works with games that aren't well threaded, or have buggy threading under wine i.e this bug: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11674
Also GPU bottlenecks might mask improvements with this option. I tried forcing Crysis 1 to a single thread but I was still getting GPU bottlenecked, so that may explain why there was no improvement with threaded opt in that game (or there is another explanation)

Can't speak for optimisations outside of the threaded opt, haven't tested older drivers thoroughly. Make sure VSync is turned off or triple buffering is enabled. In the second case, make sure FXAA is off as it doesn't work with triple buffering.