Linux: ATI and Nvidia drivers year review

[kllrnohj]

Phoronix posted two articles discussing and benchmarking all the changes that occured in both the ATI and Nvidia linux drivers over the past year. It is quite apparent that ATI is making a huge Linux push to get their drivers up to snuff - some games had 40-60% FPS improvements! That said, it looks like Nvidia still has the overall feature edge (not sure about performance since different class cards where used), although both featured regressions in performance in the latest drivers with Wine, which struck me as odd (although ATI took a much larger hit in more of the Wine tests)

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_ayir_2008&num=1

Looking at our benchmarks of the Catalyst 8.1 through 8.12 releases, overall the performance has evolved quite well. When AMD introduced their new OpenGL driver last year we finally had a modest level of performance within Linux games, but this continues to be improved with each new driver release. Where AMD needs to spend more time optimizing their drivers is with WINE as is very evident from our tests. Besides that, there still could be some 2D / X Render improvements, but overall the performance of the Catalyst Linux driver is in great shape.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_ayir_2008&num=1

There were a few OpenGL tests where the performance of NVIDIA's binary Linux drivers had improved this year, but the main area of improvement when it comes to performance was with the 2D / X Render support. In both GtkPerf and QGears2 there was dramatically better performance in the more recent driver releases thanks to many optimizations from this Santa Clara company. The only area there was major performance regressions worth noting were in a few of the WINE tests.