Benchmarking NVIDIA's R310 Linux Driver Improvements

[drago01]

Wayland starts coming around. We could see some huge performance wins in the near future.

Wayland does nothing to increase performance in games. Actually I expect games to run slower their because everything is redirected offscreen and put together by a compositor.

[blackout23]

waiting for AMD to counter. if not, my next card is an Nvidia one ... I am partialy to Nvidia already but low prices on AMD cards do still mess up the decision.

For 200 USD you get a NVIDIA Card with better performance than a 200 USD AMD Card.

[bug77]

For 200 USD you get a NVIDIA Card with better performance than a 200 USD AMD Card.

I'm an nvidia guy and I'll tell you it's not so clear-cut. If you're talking linux only, nvidia will wipe the floor with AMD when using the blobs; if you're an open source die-hard, you're better served with AMD. If you're also using windows, some titles will run better on AMD hardware, but more will favor nvidia; if you watch movies on windows, too, things start shifting in AMD's favour again.
So there, pretty soon you'll need a PhD just for picking the right card

[Kano]

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.

[haplo602]

For 200 USD you get a NVIDIA Card with better performance than a 200 USD AMD Card.

that's not so clear ... performance is only part of the package ... f.e. the amd oss drivers work very well for most things while nvidia are not good at the moment.

[blackout23]

Ok if you take into account if driveres are open source or not that might be a different thing. But I would not spend 400 USD on a graphics card without using the best possible driver no matter if they are blobs or not. I want performance for my money.

[bug77]

Why do you think is radeon oss so much better?

I didn't say it's "so much better". I think it's better because I think radeon is more feature complete. I could be wrong, as I don't pay close attention to either.

[FutureSuture]

Nice minimum 20% boost across the board. Sometimes even 25%.

Valve should do their "Faster Zombies" test with L4D2 on Linux vs. Windows 7 again.
Which ended 315 vs. 270 FPS in favor of Linux with OpenGL. Wonder it would score 378 FPS now on Linux.

I would quite like that as well! Perhaps someone else could redo Valve's test, and then add a test including the R310 driver this time.

[speculatrix]

how did the power consumption measurements go?

those of us with nvidia chips in our laptops would like to know whether the performance has a penalty

[Drago]

Wayland does nothing to increase performance in games. Actually I expect games to run slower their because everything is redirected offscreen and put together by a compositor.

Wayland will turn off redirection for full screen windows.