Low-End NVIDIA/AMD GPU Comparison On Open-Source Drivers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Low-End NVIDIA/AMD GPU Comparison On Open-Source Drivers

For those looking to purchase a low or mid-range graphics card for use with the open-source graphics drivers -- rather than being bound by NVIDIA's proprietary driver or AMD's Catalyst -- here's a comparison of nine different discrete graphics cards when benchmarked by the open-source drivers.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=18520

[smitty3268]

Just to see how the Intel graphics compares to low-end discrete cards with the OSS stack.

[[Knuckles]]

Thanks for the benchmarks. It's nice to see low-end/cheap hardware being tested, instead of just the latest and greatest

[plantroon]

I have GeForce GT520. I tried ubuntu 13.04 installed on USB and I got GPU lockups with nouveau driver. My primary OS is archlinux with nvidia proprietary. The tearing I get is horrible. The card can't do a single smooth animation. World of Goo is lagging/tearing or something. I already sent a report to nvidia. I can run Team Fortress 2 at 30+ FPS with settings maxed. I get a lot of tearing which makes it look really bad and the loading time is too long. If this card can run TF2 and Serious Sam 3 at decent framerate, why can't it run 2D games?? Also, in Openarena, Nexuiz, Assaultcube and similar games from archlinux repo I get 60+ FPS and no tearing if I enable vsync. However, I get a lot of tearing in Warsow for example. Another game with noticeable tearing is Splice. Well, just saying, I'd like someone to tell me if I am the only one who has all those problems. They are all reproducible in KDE/Gnome, even worse with WMs using XRender. I tested: Archlinux x64 nvidia proprietary 313.18 Xorg 1.13 and Ubuntu 12.04.2 x64 nvidia proprietary 295.XX Xorg 1.11 ... hopefully I will get this solved in the near future.

[johnc]

I have GeForce GT520. I tried ubuntu 13.04 installed on USB and I got GPU lockups with nouveau driver. My primary OS is archlinux with nvidia proprietary. The tearing I get is horrible. The card can't do a single smooth animation. World of Goo is lagging/tearing or something. I already sent a report to nvidia. I can run Team Fortress 2 at 30+ FPS with settings maxed. I get a lot of tearing which makes it look really bad and the loading time is too long. If this card can run TF2 and Serious Sam 3 at decent framerate, why can't it run 2D games?? Also, in Openarena, Nexuiz, Assaultcube and similar games from archlinux repo I get 60+ FPS and no tearing if I enable vsync. However, I get a lot of tearing in Warsow for example. Another game with noticeable tearing is Splice. Well, just saying, I'd like someone to tell me if I am the only one who has all those problems. They are all reproducible in KDE/Gnome, even worse with WMs using XRender. I tested: Archlinux x64 nvidia proprietary 313.18 Xorg 1.13 and Ubuntu 12.04.2 x64 nvidia proprietary 295.XX Xorg 1.11 ... hopefully I will get this solved in the near future.

I found that when I upgraded from Ubuntu 11.04 -> 12.04 I got tearing in games and some video. It happened in both Unity and GNOME Shell, so maybe it was a GNOME3 thing. I was surprised with its prevalence.

I think a combination of the experimental compiz and the latest nvidia drivers (310 or 313 something) should address the tearing stuff. So hopefully it won't be much longer. However I'm not sure if this will apply to undirected full-screen windows.

[Kano]

I tested some cards yesterday with mesa 9.1/kernel 3.8. My gt220 worked with kms. The most problematic card i tested was 7600 gt, there only kde worked but not even xbmc or gl2benchmark (tests 1-3 work on most cards usually). It was interesting that my gt 630 oem with kepler was already capable of running tf 2 (beta) - but with lots of jumps in fps - not really playable but rendering looked correct. What i found out too is that more or less no card has support for UEFI GOP. Basically the video bios must be dual, one legacy and one uefi one, but very hard to find... Intel onboard works of course with GOP.

[sofar]

For those looking to purchase a low or mid-range graphics card for use with the open-source graphics drivers

...

If people are looking for cards that run well with open source driver stacks, this article/test report only shows them half of the story.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

What's the intention behing the flag: --enable-libstdcxx-debug

Do you intentionally want to create debug libraries, while testing performance of these cards? I can understand if you plan on testing and seeing if your code throws any errors/exceptions to perhaps improve the test suite.

[archibald]

If people are looking for cards that run well with open source driver stacks, this article/test report only shows them half of the story.

What's the other half of the story? If you're implying Intel then that wouldn't fit with the premise of somebody buying a graphics card.

[l8gravely]

It's not clear from the article if you ran completely bleeding edge Ubuntu 13.04 or stock, but it would be interesting to see those tests re-run with 12.04 or 12.10 with the latest patches instead. I doubt that many people are going to download and install the latest kernel and/or Mesa drivers, it's just a total pain to do so. And fraught with complexities.

Showing these results on a more mainstream, or even slightly older distro would be more useful. As it is, I'm thinking that I should upgrade my main machine to something better, but I don't game all that much and don't need super performance, just stability and 2D speed/clarity on the display.

Thanks for the work, I do appreciate it.