NVIDIA Continues Beating Other Vendors On OpenGL Support

Along a similar theme to Rich Geldreich's recent post on A Game Developer's Perspective On Linux Driver Quality, here are some OpenGL sample tests of OpenGL 3.2 through OpenGL 4.4 with many different graphics drivers.

Christophe Riccio has carried out some tests of OpenGL samples at all levels using the NVIDIA 337.61 Beta, AMD Catalyst 14.4 Release Candidate, Intel 10.18.10.3574, Mesa 10.1.1 with Intel hardware, and Mac OS X 10.9.2 with its OpenGL stack. These tests aren't Linux-specific but in the case of the Intel tests and also the NVIDIA driver support being about the same between Windows and Linux, the results are rather interesting.

From these latest OpenGL driver compliance tests, NVIDIA's binary driver is the clear winner. The AMD Catalyst driver tends to do welll (but slightly worse) against Catalyst up through OpenGL 4.1 support while with the GL 4.4/4.3/ARB support it falls far behind. OS X tends to do poorly with its OpenGL 4.x compliance. Meanwhile, Mesa is doing okay -- and similar to Catalyst and OS X -- with its GL 3.2 and GL 3.3 support.

Those wishing to view the concise OpenGL driver results in full for May 2014 can visit G-Truc.net.