3 ms·

> 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 r

by 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 Furthermore Left 4 Dead is using D3D 9 IIRC, so pretty outdated.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]

by jhasse 9y ago

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]