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> Not to detract from this very nice development, but it's still the case on many laptops that installing Linux tends to extend battery life substantially, not

• microcolonel 9y ago
  The open source AMD graphics drivers in Mesa are considerably more stable than the equivalent Windows drivers and the proprietary Linux drivers (though those are getting a bit better). In many cases the open source drivers outperform the proprietary ones. The Mesa Intel drivers have been rock solid since about 2010, I've not had an issue with the stable release of Mesa on standard Intel hardware since then. I've run an average of two models from each generation of Intel hardware since 2010 except Broadwell, and not encountered an issue. Switchable graphics can be a bit of a pain, but with a bit of fiddling around with DRIRC and a PRIME-capable GPU driver it can be had without too much pain.
  • jhasse 9y ago
    > The open source AMD graphics drivers in Mesa are considerably more stable than the equivalent Windows drivers What?? Not in my experience! Windows can even recover from graphic driver crashes. > In many cases the open source drivers outperform the proprietary ones. Maybe for OpenGL. But DirectX 11 is nearly always faster (e.g. bytecode shaders) and only available on Windows.
    • microcolonel 9y ago
      > Maybe for OpenGL. But DirectX 11 is nearly always faster (e.g. bytecode shaders) and only available on Windows. This statement utterly untrue, there is nothing especially performant about D3D11. FYI, "bytecode shaders" have nothing to do with shader performance. They have some impact on initial parse time, but little else.
      • jhasse 9y ago
        > there is nothing especially performant about D3D11. Not in D3D11 itself, but due to it being the prevalent API, drivers are optimized for it. See https://medium.com/layerth/benchmarks-dota-2-streaming-feat-i7-vs-ryzen-b9a4936499bd https://medium.com/layerth/benchmarks-dota-2-streaming-feat-... for example. > FYI, "bytecode shaders" have nothing to do with shader performance. They have some impact on initial parse time, but little else. You're right, it shouldn't make that much of a difference, but I think driver/compiler optimizations for HLSL (and lack thereof for GLSL) is one of the reasons, games are faster on Windows using the AMD driver than Mesa. It also plays a role that most ports are using HLSL to GLSL translators. There definitely are cases where the open source driver outperforms the proprietary Linux driver. But I haven't seen a case where a game runs faster on Linux than on Windows with AMD hardware.
        • harrygeez 9y ago
          IIRC L4D does. Valve wrote a blog post about it
          • jhasse 9y ago
            The comparison was 270 FPS (Windows D3D) vs 315 FPS (Linux OpenGL). At those high framerates I don't think that any performance boost is relevant anymore. Furthermore Left 4 Dead is using D3D 9 IIRC, so pretty outdated. http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/ http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  • EpicEng 9y ago
    That's a massive cherry pick right there. People who, you know, buy GPUs to play games, run windows because the experience is _always_ better.
• michaelmrose 9y ago
  Laptop's with switchable gpu seem to be challenging to get to work as designed wherein the integrated gpu is the only one used much of the time.
• 43224gg252 9y ago
  You probably don't use Linux.
  • rifung 9y ago
    That's a weird assumption to make but I use Linux for both my work and personal laptop as well as my work desktop.