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In what world are nVidia drivers crap? I'm regularly doing some pretty funky stuff with OpenGL on top of X11 and nVidia and this setup fails me less often and l

In what world are nVidia drivers crap? I'm regularly doing some pretty funky stuff with OpenGL on top of X11 and nVidia and this setup fails me less often and less hard than any equivalent AMD setup has done so far. Unless I'm trying to allocating tons textures or ridiculously sized vertex buffers, I don't see any hickups at all.

shmerl 7y ago
In the Linux world. All of their problems (roughly you can call them poor integration with the Linux stack) are consequences of them refusing to upstream their kernel driver. The fact that Nvidia blob fails you less is not a good indicator for you, unless you test with Mesa as well in each case. Mesa is a lot stricter about OpenGL spec compliance. So if you only test on Nvidia, you likely have bugs that you didn't notice.
- gmueckl 7y ago
  Every time I tested with Mesa and had issues, it turned out that Mesa was out of spec and quite specifically lying about that fact. And this was with absolutely essential features like rendering into floating point textures. So no, Mesa is not an indicator for spec compliance, either.
  - shmerl 7y ago
    I suppose that was a long time ago? Today Mesa is compliant a lot more than Nvidia blob. See also: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenGL-Texture-Float-Freed https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenGL-T...
    - gmueckl 7y ago
      Well, that was just one example that I found really egregious. I am usually right to distrust Mesa more than the nVidia blob.
      - shmerl 7y ago
        So when was it exactly? I doubt recently. Mesa progressed to the point of full compliance a few years ago. Today, it's trusted a lot more than the blob, due to the later silently swallowing errors frequently and messing around with substituting shaders behind the scenes. Try testing current Mesa versions. Previous experiences are no longer relevant.

shmerl 7y ago

In the Linux world. All of their problems (roughly you can call them poor integration with the Linux stack) are consequences of them refusing to upstream their kernel driver. The fact that Nvidia blob fails you less is not a good indicator for you, unless you test with Mesa as well in each case. Mesa is a lot stricter about OpenGL spec compliance. So if you only test on Nvidia, you likely have bugs that you didn't notice.

gmueckl 7y ago
Every time I tested with Mesa and had issues, it turned out that Mesa was out of spec and quite specifically lying about that fact. And this was with absolutely essential features like rendering into floating point textures. So no, Mesa is not an indicator for spec compliance, either.
- shmerl 7y ago
  I suppose that was a long time ago? Today Mesa is compliant a lot more than Nvidia blob. See also: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenGL-Texture-Float-Freed https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenGL-T...
  - gmueckl 7y ago
    Well, that was just one example that I found really egregious. I am usually right to distrust Mesa more than the nVidia blob.
    - shmerl 7y ago
      So when was it exactly? I doubt recently. Mesa progressed to the point of full compliance a few years ago. Today, it's trusted a lot more than the blob, due to the later silently swallowing errors frequently and messing around with substituting shaders behind the scenes. Try testing current Mesa versions. Previous experiences are no longer relevant.