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Graphics Software Linux

Linux GPU Performance 373

Posted by CmdrTaco from the how-does-your-rack-stack dept.
CrzyP writes "AnandTech.com has benchmarked the most popular graphics cards from ATI and NVidia on the Linux OS (SuSE 9.1). It is interesting to see that they have also written a custom benchmarking tool which can also be downloaded from the article. Take a look at Kristopher Kubicki's "Linux 3D AGP GPU Roundup" to see how each of the mid to high end cards performed on the Penguin flavored system."
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Linux GPU Performance More

Linux GPU Performance

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  • Kristopher Kubicki (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheReckoning ( 638253 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @02:42PM (#10431685) Journal
    Get that man on the KDE team IMMEDIATELY! His parents obviously had a grasp of the KDE naming convention long ago.

    It's funny. Laugh.

  • Except (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Isn't NVidia refusing to allow driver support for recent linux kernels on some of their cards?

    What good is good GPU performance if you have to run an old kernel to run the GPU at all?
    • But I run Linux-2.6.8.1 with a Geforce FX 5700 and it works fine. I suspect you may have old information.

    • Re:Except (Score:4, Informative)

      by jejones ( 115979 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @03:24PM (#10432188) Journal
      It took nVidia a while to get around to releasing a driver that could deal with 4K stacks, which more recent kernels have switched to from 8K. It was a pain in the posterior for Fedora Core 2 for a while, but no longer. Maybe that's what you're referring to?

  • Penguin-flavored? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04, 2004 @02:42PM (#10431689)
    Umm, you're supposed to be putting the Linux CDs into the CD drive, not taste-testing them... ;)

    What does a penguin taste like, anyhow?

  • ATI vs nVidia (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Eeknay ( 766740 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @02:46PM (#10431724)
    Wow, this is very surprising. One would expect with similar Windows benchmarks for the X800 to be matching or beating the 6800 Ultra (depending on drivers of course), so these low X800 scores in Linux really are quite a shock.

    • Re:ATI vs nVidia (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) * on Monday October 04, 2004 @02:50PM (#10431778)
      If low-performing Linux ATI drivers are a shock to you, you haven't been paying attention for a few years. :(

      • Re:ATI vs nVidia (Score:3, Insightful)

        by strider44 ( 650833 )
        The thing I found amazing when reading the article to the end was the very last paragraph:

        During publication of this review, we received some information from ATI about some upcoming Linux announcements which they are working on. We will keep you informed of the details as we hear them.

        Is it true? Is ATI finally getting it's act together with linux? Can linux finally become a game platform with everyone able to play?

        Looking at past experiences, don't get your hopes up methinks.

    • Re:ATI vs nVidia (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      They did not use a XT or XTPE, only the Pro. The Pro never beats an Ultra and rarely bests the GT:

      http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2044
    • What else could it be?

    • Re:ATI vs nVidia (Score:5, Informative)

      by tempmpi ( 233132 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @02:53PM (#10431833)
      Not really, it is common knowledge that Nvidia's linux binary drivers are much better than Ati's. Not only the performance is better in Nvidia's drivers but they are also more compatible. People often had problems getting ATI's binary drivers working, while Nvidia's drivers are working without problem in most configurations and even problems like 4k stacks were fixed withhin a reasonable time.

  • ...vs. same cards with Windows? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TrollBridge ( 550878 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @02:47PM (#10431749) Homepage Journal
    Those numbers are all well and good, but I'd be interested in seeing them side-by-side with the same tests performed (on the same machines, of course) running Windows.
    • but I'd be interested in seeing them side-by-side with the same tests performed (on the same machines, of course) running Windows.

      I'd like to see that comparision as well, but with Linux using open source drivers on documented hardware. (I know that would disqualify a lot of nVidia and ATI chips from the test.)

    • Re:...vs. same cards with Windows? (Score:5, Informative)

      by DeckerEgo ( 520694 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @03:05PM (#10431967) Homepage
      Here's what they noticed (more of a summary than a benchmarking):
      Although this analysis did draw some pretty strong lines as to where each card stand, we were more interested in how each game performed compared to their Windows counterparts. We drew a lot of conclusions from one of our more recent video card analyses from July. Surprisingly, most of our NVIDIA video cards scaled very similarly. Wine games like Jedi Knight took a 10% to 15% hit in performance compared to the Windows tests that we did just a few weeks ago. Other games like Unreal Tournament 2004 actually showed mild signs of an increase in frame rate on the NVIDIA graphics cards. Wolfenstein: ET generally performed with similar average FPS to our video cards from 2003. However, keep in mind that the drivers used then were almost a year old.

  • My linux GPUbreakdown from independant tests: (Score:5, Funny)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @02:48PM (#10431753) Journal

    NVidia: Sort-of

    ATI: Kind-of

  • Are you saying (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04, 2004 @02:50PM (#10431775)
    We can run Linux on a GPU now?

  • Better drivers and licensing please (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Handbrewer ( 817519 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @02:51PM (#10431797) Homepage
    The situation right now is quite frustrating - all distributions should be able to ship the binary drivers for the vendor kernel. It would make it so much easier, than having to get the kernel source and headers before building the module on your own. Thats an unneccesary burden only placed on our shoulders because of some paperwork. 2nd, id like some better drivers please, the ATI drivers are terrible, please stop treating me as a second rank costumer. My money is as good as anybody elses. Thanks so far NVIDIA, now we just need a better license.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @03:08PM (#10432003)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Here's a question for you, based on what you've said... do you think that Linux users would be willing to pay $2-4 for a CD with the proper drivers, as well as lifetime updates via the web? Do you thing that would that make it more likely that Linux drivers would be developed?
      • frankly its a joke

        nvidia has always fscked around trying to get mangled source into XFree

        ATI where unable to understand what this linux thing was but people who ati trusted wrote drivers...

        solution - provide the chip spec's
        frankly with CG and other GPU compilers the hardware should be patented if not then what harm is there ?

        giving out spec with COPYRIGHT stamped all over it only supports you

        for example those XGI people could capture the market by opens sourceing the drivers (they failed under SIS bec
    • The situation right now is quite frustrating - all distributions should be able to ship the binary drivers for the vendor kernel. It would make it so much easier, than having to get the kernel source and headers before building the module on your own.

      I'm not sure what distro you're using, but with suse 9.1, no such contortions are needed. I simply checked the box in yast that says "install nvidia drivers" and a message popped up saying "nvidia drivers will take effect next time X is restarted".

      The artic
      • Well the NVIDIA driver installer does build a module that matches your kernel. I run Debian, and i had to apt-get the kernel source and headers, not a terrible task to do, but should not be necessary to do, just to get the newest driver. I dident say the kernel need recompilation. And you need to modify the XF86Config-4 file from "nv" to "nvidia" in the driver section and thats about it. 30 seconds is about the time yes, but only after i got the kernel headers and source, some 30-40 mbs of source, not that
      • You're mostly right about not needing to recompile. But it depends on the distro.

        If you don't have the kernel source that was used to build the kernel you're running, you'll need to either obtain it, or in many cases, obtain the latest kernel source and build a kernel to match it.

        Wasting the space to have the kernel sources around is pretty sucky just to upgrade a video driver. I'm thinking small, set-top or embedded gaming machines, like something jammed into an arcade cabinet.

        But, what the hell, I al

  • Linux Gaming, In Summary (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TrollBridge ( 550878 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @02:52PM (#10431812) Homepage Journal
    From TFA:

    "High performance gaming on Linux certainly isn't for everyone. We spent weeks preparing for this analysis and we still ran into problems that we could not correct. So many times, we came to a solution for a problem only to find our Linux distribution had some files in a slightly different place or our file dependency tree was completely broken. These are the things that scare away people from Linux."

    That is the 100% gospel truth. I couldn't have said it better myself. How then will the Linux community and game publishers overcome this (IMHO) enormous obstacle?

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @02:57PM (#10431878)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • "A highly-componentized system is great for flexibility, but a nightmare for usability and developers."

        Which is why I believe the "desktop Linux" is doomed to fail, ultimately.

        For servers, you want all of the customizability you can get. You want users who can tweak the most minute of details, because the system's performance and security depends on it.

        On the other hand, that doesn't bode well for desktop applications, which rely on certain system assumptions in order to work properly. Microsoft's

        • "A highly-componentized system is great for flexibility, but a nightmare for usability and developers."

          Which is why I believe the "desktop Linux" is doomed to fail, ultimately.

          But that's exactly why we have custom distro's to handle these things. Mandrake/Suse/Gentoo/etc. simply write wrappers (RPMs/ebuilds/etc.) around apps that handle the problem of tweaking each app to fit their particular distro.

          Admittedly, they don't always do a fantastic job of this, particularly when close-source drivers are
    • As someone who keeps a Windows 2000 box around 95% for gaming, its nice to see however, that things have come a long way since I last looked seriously at Linux Gaming. Of course the game I play most (Half Life - well, its mods anyways) has no native support, and it doesn't look like HL2 will either. However, games like UT2004 and Doom 3 are among games that I truly enjoy playing and do have native Linux binaries. Seeing this article that says installing drivers for my Nvidia card are now simple (at least
      • Seeing this article that says installing drivers for my Nvidia card are now simple (at least in Suse, I usually run Fedora) makes me think about going dual boot on my gaming machine just to start trying a conversion to Linux gaming.

        I'm running an nVidia card on Fedora 2 (x86-64) and the installation went flawlessly. After a few trivial X11 config changes to let the X server know about the new video card, DVI and accelerated OpenGL worked like a charm.

    • Odd (Score:2)

      by temojen ( 678985 )
      When I got a new video card (Geforce FX 5700) all I had to do was "emerge nvidia-kernel nvidia-glx" then "opengl-update nvidia" and change the chipset and videoram in my XF86Config. All of this took me about 1/2 hour, including installing the card.
      • In the article they did say installing the nVidia drivers in Linux was easier than installing them in Windows. So they aren't talking about installing nVidia drivers when they say they ran into problems.

        Read the article for details on the problems they ran into; most of the problems were with ATi's drivers and specific bugs/glitches in games.
      • When I bought a new video card for my PC, I put the card in, inserted the CD and booted my machine. Windows installed a driver and told me to reboot. Upon reboot, everything was fine.

        As a Linux user, I have to tweak configuration files. Yeah, that's fine for me because I'm a geek. Try to get your mother to do that.

        Why should you have to put your videoram in your X config anyhow? It can figure it out from the card!

        • Re:Odd (Score:3, Insightful)

          by O ( 90420 )
          Ha! Try to get your mother to open up a computer and install a new video card first....
      • Funny, I had exactly the opposite problem trying to get my Radeon8500 working properly in Gentoo. After multiple installations following all manner of differing opinions and help on the official gentoo forums I gave up and put win2k back on it.

        • Re:Odd (Score:4, Informative)

          by Synn ( 6288 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @04:07PM (#10432685)
          That's the difference between a vendors that supports you and one that doesn't.

          NVidia isn't a problem under Linux because they actually put out decent drivers for it. But ATI support is horrid, because the company barely puts any effort into Linux drivers.
      • When I got a new video card (Geforce FX 5700) all I had to do was "emerge nvidia-kernel nvidia-glx" then "opengl-update nvidia" and change the chipset and videoram in my XF86Config. All of this took me about 1/2 hour, including installing the card.

        And how'd you figure out how to do all of this? I would have *never* figured this out. I can't imagine a whole lot of other people would be able to figure this out, either.
    • How then will the Linux community and game publishers overcome this (IMHO) enormous obstacle?

      Maybe if a site analogous to the Linux Counter were established, to count the number of Linux gamers, recording hardware, games played under Linux, games we wish we were playing under Linux, etc...

      The root of the problem is a lack (though obviously it's not as bad as it was) of communication. So maybe if we could tell more companies that Linux gamers are numerous enough to be worth pleasing, we could get some res
    • From TFA: "High performance gaming on Linux certainly isn't for everyone. We spent weeks preparing for this analysis and we still ran into problems that we could not correct. So many times, we came to a solution for a problem only to find our Linux distribution had some files in a slightly different place or our file dependency tree was completely broken. These are the things that scare away people from Linux." That is the 100% gospel truth. I couldn't have said it better myself. How then will the Linux c
    • How? Very simple... let the distribution manage the updates for you. If you are using free software it shouldn't be a problem -- and if you aren't a free software zealot for drivers then use a distribution that manages the binary graphics drivers for you. It's not that hard.

      "Linux" is a shitty platform for binary compatibility though, and all indications suggest that this will continue to be the case for the near future at least. Don't expect non-free games and other software binaries to work with "Lin
    • I thought this excerpt from the article was more indicative of the Linux/Gaming situation:

      Unfortunately, the decision to buy new hardware constantly goes hand in hand with the decision to play some new game - and if it's a gaming machine you want, then Linux isn't the operating system that you need.

      IOW, new hardware (especially graphics cards) is purchased in order to run software that can not adequately run on yesterday's gear. Even though the graphics card manufacturers do release Linux drivers, it's

    • We need... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by SaDan ( 81097 )
      A dedicated distro for gaming on Linux. End of story.

      Until EVERYONE adheres to some sort of guidelines (HA! Yeah, RIGHT!), people are going to be dealing with oddball dependancies, kernel/driver issues, and filesystem layout annoyances.

      Documentation all around needs to improve too, for both the Linux distros and the game makers.
    • I couldn't have said it better myself. How then will the Linux community and game publishers overcome this (IMHO) enormous obstacle?

      They won't.

      Just throw your collective hands in the air and admit that everyone should just use Microsoft products to play games.

      Or Nintendo.....

      Or Playstation.....

    • Re:Linux Gaming, In Summary (Score:4, Informative)

      by Atzanteol ( 99067 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @04:56PM (#10433456) Homepage
      I believe that's what the Linux Standards Base [linuxbase.org] people are trying to fix. I've spoken to them at Linux world. Their goal is to eventually be able to have developers say "This program can run on any distro LSB1.0 compliant."

  • It's all Mesa's fault! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04, 2004 @02:52PM (#10431815)
    If it weren't for the spinless Mesa developer for switching away from LGPL licence just to please the incompetent xfree crew, we would have major companies contributing open codes, instead of having them taking stuff and releasing slower, buggy, proprietary drivers.

    Remember ALSA? It sticks its gun to GPL right down to the driver, and Creative actually donate SBLive driver for it, when the company was already crushing everyone else (Aureal included) sound card market! This should be how Mesa license the code, not the lame, bogus, xfree licence.
    • we would have major companies contributing open codes, instead of having them taking stuff and releasing slower, buggy, proprietary drivers

      Slower? Please explain to me how you've come to the conclusion that NVidia's closed source drivers are slower than the open source ones, especially given that the open source ones don't support 3D acceleration at all?

  • "Penguin flavored" (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Mmmm.... Penguin flavored. *drool*

  • No Americas Army? (Score:3, Informative)

    by planckscale ( 579258 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @03:06PM (#10431984) Journal
    I've only played 2 games on Linux, America's Army and Postal2. Postal2 looked pretty good but torching people gets boring.

    On an nVidia MX 400 card, AA is playable and actually pretty fun online, but shadows are mostly chunks of squares on the ground. Otherwise, rpg's and smoke grenades look fantastic. I wonder why they didn't do comparisons of at least AA? I would think that's one of the first games people download for Linux especially because it's free.

    Oh yeah, I had some original difficulty installing the nvidia drivers on a knoppix hd install with the 2.6 kernel, but I finally got it running well and documented the installation here: http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10314 &highlight= [knoppix.net]

  • What about DRI? (Score:5, Informative)

    by lspd ( 566786 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @03:10PM (#10432023) Journal
    You can find my benchmarks of DRI compatible cards here. [nixnuts.net] They're a first attempt at benchmarking DRI and still need some tweaking.

    Eric Anholt's benchmarks of DRI on FreeBSD are here. [freebsd.org]

    Roland Scheidegger's comparison of the three drivers available for the Radeon 9000 (DRI, FGLRX, XIG) is here. [hispeed.ch]

    It's a bit surprising that the Radeon 8500 series is completly absent from this comparison. The 8500 and FireGL 8800 are still remarkable video cards.

  • Proprietary driver hell (Score:5, Interesting)

    by freelunch ( 258011 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @03:10PM (#10432025)
    I have an Nforce2 based MB with built-in video..

    For a few months I ran Nvidia's proprietary driver but found that their support was poor. Countless people would report the same problem and Nvidia would basically just shrug and not even reply to the postings on their website. Stuff like "not our problem". They were very slow to support 2.6.

    And as a gentoo user, I hated the binary installation program.

    I finally dumped their stuff and went to the OSS driver. It is much slower, even when just opening new browser windows or xterms. But not having to mess with nvidia installer hell each time I gen a new kernel (which is pretty rare, actually) makes it worth it.

    This was a great article, however, because it shows just how much chance and luck there is in getting these drivers to work. Buying the latest and greatest MB and CPU for use with Linux is still a huge unknown for the novice and experienced Linux user alike. And then there is the very real fear of whether it will work after you upgrade your kernel, etc.

    Sad to see that Nvidia is the most Linux friendly vendor??
    • I still don't understand why people bash Nvidia because of the binary drivers they provide. In spite of Linux being low on the desktop count, Nvidia is nice enought to provide current drivers for all of their latest cards. They were quick to support the 2.6 kernel. If the driver works and works well why does it matter whether it's open or not?

      • Re:Proprietary driver hell (Score:4, Insightful)

        by cowbutt ( 21077 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @04:00PM (#10432574) Journal
        I still don't understand why people bash Nvidia because of the binary drivers they provide. In spite of Linux being low on the desktop count, Nvidia is nice enought to provide current drivers for all of their latest cards. They were quick to support the 2.6 kernel. If the driver works and works well why does it matter whether it's open or not?

        Oh, little things, like the reassurance of being able to continue to use the hardware I've paid for even if nVidia don't feel like continuing to develop the drivers if-and-when the kernel API changes - like with the recent 4k stacks issue. That, and Free drivers are more stable that proprietary drivers in my experience, and when they aren't, you can look at the code to try to figure out why, rather than crossing your fingers and waiting for a driver update that may never come.

        --

        • Re:Proprietary driver hell (Score:4, Insightful)

          by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <`gro.daetsriek' `ta' `todhsals'> on Monday October 04, 2004 @04:21PM (#10432940)

          Oh, little things, like the reassurance of being able to continue to use the hardware I've paid for even if nVidia don't feel like continuing to develop the drivers if-and-when the kernel API changes

          Yeah. You mean like my Zoran TV tuner card that hasnt worked since the 2.2 series, despite their being public specs and sources for it? Drivers are only maintained as long as the developer is around. And unless you have the skills to write your own drivers (and most of us, including large numbers of application developers, *don't*), the having specs/source or not is irrelevant.

          ...like with the recent 4k stacks issue...

          You mean the "issue" that nvidia had *working drivers* for within weeks after it was *even an option* in the kernel? You mean the "issue" that "open" drivers like *ahem* ATI have and NVidia does not?

          That, and Free drivers are more stable that proprietary drivers in my experience, and when they aren't, you can look at the code to try to figure out why

          Again. you are in the vast minority in being able to do this. So don't bash NVidia for catering to the rest of us.

          • Open your wallet (Score:5, Insightful)

            by anti-NAT ( 709310 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @07:40PM (#10434976) Homepage

            You mean like my Zoran TV tuner card that hasnt worked since the 2.2 series, despite their being public specs and sources for it? Drivers are only maintained as long as the developer is around. And unless you have the skills to write your own drivers (and most of us, including large numbers of application developers, *don't*), the having specs/source or not is irrelevant.

            Why not offer to pay an open source developer to update it ? At least you have that option, independent of the manufacturer's support for doing so.

            You going to have the same problem with Linux kernel version 4.0, when Nvidia don't provide a driver for their XYZ card in 2010. Problem is, at that time, you won't have access to the specs, so you won't even have the option of paying an open source developer to update the driver for you.

  • Standardization (Score:5, Interesting)

    by acherrington ( 465776 ) <acherringtonNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday October 04, 2004 @03:10PM (#10432028)
    In my opinion this is the best thing to happen to linux in some time. Any time that you can develop standards for an industry, you can finally give a target for competitors to aim at (e.g. each other). This will drive competition and really drive the market forward. I would consider this a first step forward.

    After both ATI and nVidia clobber each other with better framerates and better overall performance, I think that a new competitive advantage will develop... perhaps this may be better graphics quality or easier installs.

  • The real question is (Score:5, Interesting)

    by IceFox ( 18179 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @03:17PM (#10432117) Homepage
    Planning to plunk down some money soon and what I want to know is: What is the best video card you can get that works in Linux that *doesn't* require binary drivers? I don't perticularly care to be locked into one kernel if given the option. -Benjamin Meyer

    • nvidia (Score:4, Informative)

      by poohsuntzu ( 753886 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @03:25PM (#10432197) Homepage
      There are OpenSource drivers for Nvidia video cards, however they are no where near as fast as the official binaries and can't preform 3d worth a damn.

      You have to realise what you are asking here. The binary drivers that you are mentioning (which, by the way, never lock you to a certain kernel) are using the code made by ATI/NVIDIA to take advantage of their hardware's features. PixelShading, 3d processing. Each have their own way for their hardware to preform 3d functioning. This is not something they are going to disclose (they are a buisness too, remember?) and thus the open source drivers for video cards are always going to be horrid compared to the avalaible binaries.

      Seriously though. Get a card that works great on linux despite the binary packaging. And I still don't see how it locks you into one kernel? Could you explain further in depth what you mean for me? Because upgrading nvidia (which must be done each time you update/replace your kernel) is as simple as shutting down the X server, rerunning the nvidia binary, and then rebooting the X server.

      • Re:nvidia (Score:5, Informative)

        by erikharrison ( 633719 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @04:02PM (#10432602)
        Have you tried to run multiple kernels with the Nvidia drivers? Everytime I booted into a different kernel, I had to uninstall and reinstall the driver. And what about 4k stacks?

        Besides, you didn't answer his question - he said "What's a good card with solid open source drivers?" You said "Nvidia has open source drivers but they suck, you shouldn't care about the binary only drivers."

        I'd still advocate a Nvidia or ATI card. ATI makes regular code drops to the DRI and Mesa projects, and the open source drivers are of reasonable quality, and the nv drivers are high profile, with lots of work going into them. These cards are the most likely to see solid render acceleration in the future as XAA is replaced with a new acceleration architecture, so even with the Open Source drivers you'll see best performance with stuff like Composite (the basis of much of the X11 6.8.0 eye candy) with these cards.

        Of the two, ATI and Nvidia, the open source drivers seem to be of roughly the same quality in my experience, but the Nvidia binary driver is far superiour to the ATI binary driver. ATI has got more bang for your buck, the GATOS project is working to support a lot of ATI's extra features, and ATI seems minimally more involved in the community with an eye to becoming moreso.

        I think that pushes things solidly in ATI's favor if you're absolutely commited to the open source driver. If you're willing to use the binary driver, things become more even - it's ATI's price versus Nvidia's better support for the card under Linux/BSD

        • Re:nvidia (Score:3, Informative)

          by poohsuntzu ( 753886 )
          >>Have you tried to run multiple kernels with the Nvidia drivers? Everytime I booted into a different kernel, I had to uninstall and reinstall the driver.

          Correct, as it should apply to any kernel specific module. This isn't something to whine about, as each nvidia vinary wants to use your latest kernel headers or configurations. That shouldn't be a big deal, especially when the binary process takes about ten seconds.

          >>And what about 4k stacks?

          This was already fixed, oh a few months ago. About
    • If you want good 3D support and you don't want a binary driver, then you're simply out of luck. The best open-source drivers available for even the fastest of cards, is still completely incapable of keeping up with the closed-source binaries.

      If you don't care about 3D support then, it doesn't matter much which card you get. Basically any card from a major vendor will do just fine playing movies, displaying your desktop apps, etc. I recommend just buying something nice and cheap.
    • As far as I know it's the ATI FireGL 8800.

    • Re:The real question is (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      OEM Radeon 8500 based cards are cheap and are among the fastest cards with open source 3D drivers.
    • As others have mentioned, the best cards with open drivers are based on ATI's R200 chipset. [sourceforge.net] These cards include the Radeon 8500 and 9100, and FireGL 8700 and 8800. While the FireGL 8800 is probably fastest, it is also crazy expensive. The 9100 is a rebadged 8500 with different core and memory clock speeds. I have been told the 8500 should be faster, but have never seen any benchmark proving one to be faster than the other.

      I am not sure how fast the ViaCLE266 [sourceforge.net] is, but it does not matter since it is a chi
  • Even with my shiny new (-ish) Radeon 9800, I can only get around 80 fps in glxgears - because ATI's drivers don't support Xinerama, I'm stuck with the functional, but much slower, open-source drivers. The framerates AnandTech are be getting single-headed are a dream for me.
    However, having read the article, ATI claim to have some Linux announcements in the pipeline - with any luck, maybe these drivers will allow me to use both my monitors with some decent 3d acceleration.
    Anyway, to anyone thinking of get
    • Even with my shiny new (-ish) Radeon 9800, I can only get around 80 fps in glxgears - because ATI's drivers don't support Xinerama, I'm stuck with the functional, but much slower, open-source drivers.

      That's still poor; I'm using the Free ATI drivers from the 2.4 kernel and XFree86 4.3.0, and I get about 800fps with glxgears (lousy benchmark, BTW). On my two year old P4 2.4 and Radeon 7500.

      --

  • Why Linux sucks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @03:21PM (#10432156) Homepage
    Enabling 3D acceleration (DRI) still needs to be done manually by editing the /etc/X11/XF86Config file after running the SaX2 utility. Enabling FSAA must be done by editing the XF86Config file by hand as well (see our AA/AF section for details). After a little more than 8 hours of playing with configurations, we hit paydirt.

    Any questions?

    This binary driver thing has got to go. As Linux gains desktop market share, pressure will increase to open up the hardware interface to the driver. It's not like hooking OpenGL to the card involves any technology that isn't well known in the industry.

    • No... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      That's why ATI's crappy drivers suck. That entire page seems to be bitching exclusively about ATI's drivers. Apparently the commentary on the Nvidia drivers was on the previous page and went something like "We told it to install in yast and went init 3 and it worked." I paraphrase. In fact, only a paragraph or two on the previous page talk about Nvidia's driver, in glowing terms. The rest of it is complaining about ATI driver configuration. Then the next page (Where you got that quote) is talking about ATI

  • Little quirks (Score:3, Informative)

    by tempfile ( 528337 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @03:57PM (#10432551)
    My 9500 Pro still doesn't work and just crashes the system hard when 3D acceleration is enabled. Nobody knows this problem and nobody can explain. :(

  • The ATI drivers are bad, but not *that* bad (Score:4, Informative)

    by gotan ( 60103 ) on Monday October 04, 2004 @04:45PM (#10433297) Homepage
    I gathered some experience with the ATI drivers on Suse 9.1 recently and i too think that they're bad, but it got a little better lately.

    While there *is* an "auto-installing" driver-package from ATI you'd better avoid that (unless they fixed a good number of bugs). Just running the package resulted in an error for me, googling around i found some hints and managed to install them: run the package in extract-mode, make manually, ignore error, make install accompanied by some messing with /usr/src/linux/.config.

    there is also (for Suse 9.1) an rpm-package [suse.com]. Following the README in that path closely will get the video driver installed. Like nvidia ATIs driver combo too consists of a kernel driver and a n X-driver, and as usual the kernel-driver is a little fiddly to install. There is *no* (longer?) need to compile a custom kernel, you need to install the kernel source though (and really, read the README!).

    Be careful though when configuring the XF86config. fglrxconfig is *not* a good idea since it asks you about mouse settings, monitor modes and whatnot, things that are running perfectly well and shouldn't be touched anyway. NVIDIA does a much better job just telling you the few lines you have to change in the config, fglrxconfig produces an XF86config-4 that is mostly useless and contains heaps of garbage.

    To make the kernelmodule load automatically add two lines to the "modprobe.conf.local" (i think the first is unnecessary):

    install fglrx /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install fglrx && { /sbin /modprobe nvidia_agp; /bin/true; } alias char-major-226-0 fglrx

    In XF86config load "glx" and "dri" in the Modules sections and put
    Driver "fglrx"
    Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "no"
    in the device section. If you've got access problems put:

    Section "DRI"
    Group "video"
    Mode 0666
    EndSection

    After restarting the X-server (twice to be sure, and check if the kernel module loaded) "fglrxinfo" should tell you something about ATI (and not Mesa), if that works do a "sync" for good measure and try tuxracer.

    In my experience the nvidia-drivers are definitely easier to install, but it's really not impossible to get the ATI-stuff running.

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