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Well this is mighty fine, seems the big guns have teamed up on this one to talk about performance gains in OpenGL.

NVIDIA, AMD and Intel teamed up to deliver important OpenGL info at the Game Developer Conference.

Slides

Approaching zero driver overhead from Cass Everitt

You can view the full post on the Nvidia blog.

I hope developers do take note of things like this and look to improve their own engines, not only that I hope the driver developers themselves will continue to push OpenGL performance.

Funny, since all of this Microsoft have announced Directx12, we really need developers to pay attention to OpenGL now and try to get rid of Directx once and for all. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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Anonymous Mar 21, 2014
OMG what the fuck is wrong with AMD... They keep talking about how to improve performance and stuff but just take a look at their shitty fucked up driver. It is so awful in fact this summer it will be time for me to upgrade GPU and it will be nVidia.
Anonymous Mar 21, 2014
Just wondering Liam what GPU have you got and how is it in Linux?
Liam Dawe Mar 21, 2014
Quoting: AnonymousJust wondering Liam what GPU have you got and how is it in Linux?

Nvidia 560ti and it's fine :)
Anonymous Mar 21, 2014
Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: AnonymousJust wondering Liam what GPU have you got and how is it in Linux?
Nvidia 560ti and it's fine :)

Lucky :P Sorry for my rant earlier on. Just bit fed up with AMD linux support that all.

Do you get any issues with binary driver at all? Would you say the performance is same as Windows (If you ever tested it lol)

Thanks :)
Sabun Mar 21, 2014
QuoteSorry for my rant earlier on. Just bit fed up with AMD linux support that all.
I can't blame you for feeling that way, 2012 was probably the worst year for AMD's Catalyst driver in Linux. It got so bad, that my desktop became unusable and I went with Nvidia for 2013 (only ever owned one Nvidia card before that in my lifetime).

I will say this though, I have setup a small SteamOS machine and it's running with an AMD HD 5750. I thought it wouldn't work at all after my experience with the HD6850, but to my surprise the AMD driver that comes with SteamOS is actually performance worthy. No tears, no evil sudden drops in FPS, no weird nasty glitches in graphics, it's actually ok. I don't know though if this reflects other Linux distros.

I'm not Liam, but just to chip in, Nvidia's binary driver almost has no real issues and performs very closely to that of the Windows driver (at least in my experience over the past year and a half). It's currently the only real deal if you want the best performance in gaming on Linux, from my perspective.
Sabun Mar 21, 2014
QuoteAs for DX12, I suspect that's basically Mantle in disguise.
DirectX12 scares me, as the thought of it coming out now would mean that Wine is getting further and further away from being able to support most Windows-only games. It also means Microsoft doesn't want anyone touching it's piece of the pie, so it's going brute force.

Wine definitely isn't the solution to bringing games to Linux, thankfully we have Unity3D and what looks to be like Godot + CryEngine 4 + Unreal Engine 4 + Leadwerks for that exact purpose.

It just seems sad that Wine is still only in DirectX 9 land (not undermining their work though!). With how DX10 and DX11 were pretty much ignored, I can safely assume DX12 will be as well. It was always cool to show off games running in Wine when there wasn't a native version. It's becoming harder to do that.
Anonymous Mar 21, 2014
Quoting: SabunI'm not Liam, but just to chip in, Nvidia's binary driver almost has no real issues and performs very closely to that of the Windows driver (at least in my experience over the past year and a half). It's currently the only real deal if you want the best performance in gaming on Linux, from my perspective.

Hm I see thanks :) What nVidia GPU have you got?


Quoting: GuestI would have thought the AMD bashing to take a little longer. AMD support the FOSS driver, which last I checked was pretty damned awesome for stability, and for older cards has basically caught up with performance.

Yeah AMD FOSS driver are awesome and I am using it because it actually got less issues than catalyst but unfortunately it still not maxing my card potential :( However I do appreciate the fact that FOSS developers are working hard at it :)
Anonymous Mar 21, 2014
Quoting: GuestIntel I haven't tried, but I've not heard good things about their drivers.

The Intel drivers are fantastic, their hardware is the bottleneck. They're only just starting to squeeze in at the low-end of their competitors with their best offering when it comes to performance.
Manu Mar 21, 2014
AMD is so bad. No support for TrueHD or DTS-Hd over HDMI with Catalyst.

Have FOSS driver support for this? Or i must change from AMD to Nvidia?

I have a HD 6850.
pd12 Mar 21, 2014
It's funny how there's all this business and hype about low level GFX API with Mantle and DX12 while OpenGL already has low level stuff if you want it.
The benchmarks at Phoronix.com are great and do show you how well the nVidia binary blobs perform (and how crap the FOSS nVidia drivers are, unfortunately). AMD's Catalyst and FOSS drivers sit somewhere in the middle, although I think the FOSS drivers are better than Catalyst at times, and I remember one of the game devs on steam recommended the FOSS drivers over the Catalyst ones after recommending the Catalyst ones first. At least AMD is working on the FOSS drivers as well whereas nVidia only wants to work on the binary blobs.

But like Valve and GabeN said (check the recent AMA on reddit and Steam Dev Days 2014 on youtube), the solution to crappy Windows and D3D is not WINE (although that's great for legacy stuff) but encouraging developers to go Linux native, which is gaining traction with all the game engines coming to Linux now, and OpenGL being pretty cool in general. Valve - leading the way in Linux gaming by at least 1 year =P.
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