FreeBSD, Ubuntu Offer Same NVIDIA OpenGL Support As Windows

An anonymous reader writes "There's some good news if you use NVIDIA graphics on (Ubuntu) Linux or FreeBSD with their binary graphics driver: the OpenGL performance is comparable to Windows 8. Unfortunately, that's not the same for Intel graphics and AMD doesn't even offer a Catalyst driver for FreeBSD. FreeBSD offers a binary Linux compatibility layer to run games at the same (or better) performance as Linux, but unfortunately it's capped to running Linux x86 binaries and NVIDIA is the only GPU vendor with proper BSD graphics driver support."

Re:AMD Shooting themselves in the foot

[TheRaven64]

The PS4 doesn't use a stock FreeBSD install, it uses something that incorporates a lot of FreeBSD code. So does Android (although not in the kernel) and so does OS X, but neither of them use the same driver model for GPUs either.

Re:in 3... 2... 1...

[CajunArson]

It's kind of sad that people on Slashdot no longer understand that operating systems include modular components that can be replaced.

I installed Windows 8.. on a 5 year old Core 2 duo system using a spare hard drive. You know what? While I sure didn't like the UI choices MS made for Windows 8, it was at least as fast as my Arch Linux installation on the exact same box (the difference being that Arch got an SSD while Windows 8 was on an older mechanical hard drive).

In many ways the Windows graphics stack is well ahead of X (Wayland is fixing this fortunately, but it has taken a long time). The interesting thing is that the actual 3D stack in Linux, which practically ignores the X server in modern implementations, is actually quite good, but the actual core graphics in Windows are also very good despite what Slashtrolls would like to believe. Nvidia
has done a very good job at getting comparable performance levels out of both platforms.

Grain of salt

[gauntlet420]

This article seems to be talking about newer hardware and the NVIDIA binary blob driver. If you're stuck with Nouveau and an older NVIDIA card, your performance is going to be much worse than Windoze. I recently de-Windozed a P4 box running a GeForce440MX. Perfectly acceptable performance under XP became molasses-slow under Xubuntu 13 - we're talking seconds per screen refresh, and lots of visual artifacting. Newer distys and the legacy binary blob drivers that support GeForce 4 don't play nice with each other either. I ended up yanking the card and putting in a Radeon 9800SE (with 1/4 the video RAM) and even with the open-source radeon driver, performance was astronomically better - the machine was actually *useable*.

You missed a possibility

[cupantae]

FreeBSD offers a binary Linux compatibility layer to run games at the same (or better) performance as Linux

Or worse. It might be worse, too.