Open Source ARM Mali Driver Runs Q3A Faster Than the Proprietary Driver 71
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.
2% isn't "faster", it's a measurement error (Score:1, Insightful)
AIUI the FOSS codebase is based on reverse-engineering the binary driver. So, there would be almost no reason to expect it to be faster. There may be some CPU time saved if they can create the command buffer quicker than the binary driver manages, but it's highly unlikely they can create a general solution that makes the GPU time reduce, since they're going to have to send the same commands to the hardware anyway. A better shader compiler might achieve something but ... they don't have that.
Ergo, 2% is a measurement error. The open source driver is not faster.
Great progress, and thanks for working on this! (Score:2, Insightful)
Your work is appreciated!
Ignore all the idiots who hate their lives that lurk around /. criticizing every accomplishment of others. /. is starting to suck. Your work though is great!