Open Source ARM Mali Driver Runs Q3A Faster Than the Proprietary Driver

An anonymous reader writes "The lima driver project, the open source reverse engineered graphics driver for the ARM Mali, now has Quake 3 Arena timedemo running 2% faster than the ARM Binary driver." There's a video showing it off. Naturally, a few caveats apply; the major one is that they don't have a Free shader compiler and are forced to rely on the proprietary one from ARM, for now.

Optimized Code

[zAPPzAPP]

if (Quake3) show_fps += 30;

Re:Optimized Code

[serviscope_minor]

It's happened in the past that certain drivers have claimed better performance while at the same time completely ignoring certain things they were supposed to be doing in order to get the framerate up. Do the frames end up looking exactly the same with both drivers? What exactly is making it faster. Did they improve a specific part which only helps for Q3A demo files and doesn't actually make any difference when playing a real game.

All interesting questions. If only there was a long block of text which covered those points. I've never heard such of a thing though. But, I'm going to coin a new term, "TFA" to refer to the hypothetical object.

Anyone with me on this?