Open Radeon 3D Driver Runs At 60~70% of Proprietary Driver Speed

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?

[ifrag]

I seriously doubt Nvidia is actually going to change their ways. Nvidia claims that a significant amount of their graphics technology IS the driver and that opening it up would expose too much of their IP. AMD doesn't really seem to hold this view so I'm guessing their secret sauce is more on the hardware end. In my opinion, AMD probably even has the better hardware, as seen by how it scales more linearly up to higher resolutions. Nvidia manages to come up with enough quirky driver optimization to stay competitive.