Open Radeon 3D Driver Runs At 60~70% of Proprietary Driver Speed 245
An anonymous reader writes "AMD's Radeon HD 6000 series open-source Gallium3D driver for Linux is now working and running at 60~70% (in some cases, 80%) of the speed of the official proprietary 'Catalyst' driver. This is a big speed improvement in Mesa/Gallium3D compared to the times when the performance was crippling or even just a few years ago when AMD didn't support open-source drivers. When will NVIDIA change ways?"
Re:Why change? (Score:5, Informative)
Many reasons..
The binary driver cannot be redistributed with the linux distros..
The binary driver may drop support for older hardware at any point, and the older versions which still support your hardware are unlikely support current kernels or X11 versions.
You cannot fix a binary blob driver yourself, you are beholden to the vendor to do so.
Also that "100%" is relative to the binary driver itself, its possible that given time the open driver will surpass it.
Out of interest, does the open driver support OpenCL yet?
There really is no substitute for proprietary... (Score:5, Informative)
I have CAD at home on Linux (Draftsight for 2D and Varicad (It's Linux native!!) for 3D), and there's no substitute for the Catalyst driver. The free drivers don't cut it. They may cut it for generic desktop stuff like playing video and spinning desktop cubes, but somehow combining the free driver and any CAD package gets you a very slow experience.
Until performance really does reach 80 percent, I'm gonna have to stick with the proprietary one. And since this is only for the 6000 series and not the 4000 series (my card), I'm just gonna have to forget about it until I get new hardware.
Hands up if you've ever had to call the ATI BBS in Peterborough, ON back in the day to get the driver of the week for Mach32 on any system.
By the way, if you want free 2D Cad for Linux, get your ass over to Dassault Systems and download Draftsight.
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BMO
Re:Why change? (Score:4, Informative)
You can pass a vga= argument to the kernel on boot to allow modes other than 80x24. See this table [wikipedia.org] for possibly modes.
Re:Why change? (Score:4, Informative)
Interestingly, nVidia is actually pretty good at fixing bugs.
GNOME3 had a nasty corrupt-on-resume problem with the nVidia driver, and since a) laptops are slept and resumed often, b) nouveau has no power management to speak of, which is kinda important in a laptop, and c) the GNOME devs had no intention of fixing the problem anytime soon, it was nice that d) nVidia fixed it in a month. They're pretty good with other bugs, too.
The nice thing is that, with GNOME3 and nVidia, I have the first instance of tear-free video playback on a Linux desktopin, wel, ever*.
I don't know it AMD/ATI better now, but Catalyst used to be brutal for bug fixes. I think they're better. I also don't mean to impugn Nouveau as they've done great work with what they've had, but I do value battery life and not cooking my thighs.
* without turning off compositing and partying like it's 1999.