Rich Geldreich: A Bad Catalyst GL Driver Is Bad For Everyone

Rich Geldreich, the former Valve OpenGL developer that left the company and has been publicly expressing the poor OpenGL driver landscape, has another new post out today.

Geldreich's latest post is pointing towards my article from this weekend highlighting NVIDIA Slaughters AMD Catalyst On Linux In OpenGL 4.x Micro-Benchmarks using the APITest OpenGL 4 benchmark. Rich wrote:

This excellent GL 4.x micro-benchmark that has been making waves recently is really interesting. Now that it's on Phoronix it's about as mainstream as it's going to get: NVIDIA Slaughters AMD Catalyst On Linux In OpenGL 4.x Micro-Benchmarks

At first glance the results sound great for NV: "The AMD Catalyst driver gets absolutely annihilated for these GL4 micro-benchmarks." But unfortunately it's bad news for everyone working in GL because it clearly demonstrates just how fractured and inconsistent the GL driver landscape actually is when the rubber hits the road.

While many Phoronix readers are quick to criticize AMD's Catalyst Linux driver within our forums as well, he's right that overall it's bad for everyone due to the turbulent OpenGL landscape that's bad for both developers and end-users.