Linux 3D AGP GPU Roundup: More Cutting Edge Penguin Performance
by Kristopher Kubicki on October 4, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
The Test
Below, you can see our test rig configuration.| Performance Test Configuration | |
| Processor(s): | AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (130nm, 2.4GHz, 512KB L2 Cache) |
| RAM: | 2 x 512MB Mushkin PC-3200 CL2 (400MHz) |
| Motherboard(s): | MSI K8T Neo2 (Socket 939) |
| Memory Timings: | Default |
| Hard Drives: | Seagate 7200.7 120GB SATA |
| Video Cards: | GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB GeForce 6800 128MB GeForceFX 5950 Ultra 256MB GeForceFX 5900 Ultra 128MB GeForce 5900 128MB GeForceFX 5700 Ultra GeForceFX 5600XT Radeon X800 Pro 256MB Radeon 9800XT 256MB Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB Radeon 9600XT 128MB |
| Operating System(s): | SuSE 9.1 Professional kernel 2.6.8-14-default |
| Driver: | (ATI) SuSE 9.1 Supplement fglrx 3.12.0 NVIDIA 1.0-6111 |
You may have noticed that we are running an extremely new version of the Linux kernel, and very new ATI and NVIDIA drivers as well. For all intents and purposes, we are running a completely default SuSE 9.1 Professional install with the SuSE 9.2-RC3 kernel and brand new drivers. This was not an easy accomplishment, but was unfortunately the only manner in which we could install a platform compatible with both ATI and NVIDIA video cards on the Socket 939 architecture.
Our testing procedure is very simple. We take our various video cards and run respective time demos while using our AnandTech FrameGetter tool. We rely on in-game benchmarks for some of our tests as well - since FG will not run on Wine games. We post the average frames per second scores calculated by the utility. Remember, FG calculates the frames per second every second, but it also tells us the time that our demo ran, and how many frames it took. This average is posted for most benchmarks.
However, when testing our games, we find that some interesting patterns sometimes occur. For these instances, we have specially crafted the FG program to record our timedemo by taking the frames per second every second and dumping this data into a text file. We explained this in our initial FG announcement. Some graphs, particularly Wolfenstein and Unreal Tournament, have particularly fascinating trends, which we explore more in the evaluation.
All of our benchmarks are run three times and the highest scores obtained are taken - and as a general trend, the highest score is usually the second or third pass at the timedemo. Why don't we take the median values and standard deviation? For one, IO bottlenecks tend to occur due to the hard drive and memory, even though they "theoretically" should behave the same every time that we run the program. Memory hogs like UT2004, which tend to also load a lot of data off the hard drive, are notorious for behaving strangely on the first few passes.
Since we had issues with the ATI driver running Anisotropic Filtering, we did not run any tests with AF on. However, many of our games have sets of benchmarks with 4X Anti Aliasing disabled and enabled. At the end of this analysis, we also have a small section showing some of the differences with the various AA and anisotropic filters enabled.
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mczak - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
"On our MSI nForce3 board, this should have been the nvidia_agp module. However, try as we could, we could not get nvidia_agp and fglrx to play well with each other."This is a mistake, you do not need (and it will not work) the nvidia-agp module. For all A64 based boards, no matter if the chipset is from sis, via, nvidia or someone else, you need the amd64-agp module instead. It might have just worked with that - suse 9.1 loads it automatically for K8T800 chipset, but I think for some reason it doesn't get automatically loaded for nforce3 chipsets. It might have just worked loading it manually, saving you some time :-).
"We are not entirely sure why, but even after completely removing the NVIDIA kernel module, we still had persistent errors installing the ATI drivers correctly."
Removing the kernel module will do nothing. Nvidia drivers replace some of XFree/Xorg libraries, which are incompatible (I think libglx.a is affected by that, but there might be more), and ATI does not have its own version of these files. Uninstalling the nvidia driver with its own installer (which has an uninstall option) should get the original version back in place afaik.
directedition - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Oh, and a note on some SDL games on SUSE. On games like UT (original) and many other games using the same old installer, you need to create /mnt/cdrom and mount your cdrom there, as the installers don't tend to look for SuSE's /media/dvd nonsense, and it will often keep asking you to insert the CDROM.directedition - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
I can't belive noone's mentioned it yet, but Warcraft is an odd example of a game that tends to run better emulated under Cedega (SuSE 9.1) than natively on Windows. Blizzard has a decent relationship with Transgaming. While they won't do a native port of Warcraft III, they are willing to help Transgaming make their game compatible.I would definately like to see AnandTech take a look into this and why various Cedega games run better than others.
Ardan - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Gaming in linux doesn't take hours to achieve. If it took you hours to properly install something like, say, Enemy Territory, then you are doing it all wrong.I have set up gaming in linux on both an ATI and an nvidia card lately and neither are hassles. ATI's Linux development team has been making great strides, so don't sell them short. I fully expect them to start rolling along with new features and better support. Comparing them to when I used nvidia's older linux drivers to what they have now, it took a VERY long time to achieve. However, ATI is making strides in a shorter amount of time. Don't worry about that:)
I loved the article a lot as well, but I would like to point out that the latest ATI drivers are 3.14.1. I do not think that everything has to be open-source to be good in linux. ATI and nvidia are clearly capable of engineering great cards and great drivers, so I am okay with closed-source. Surely it must be an even bigger benefit to them to be able to see the source of the OS they're programming for.
Anandtech, keep up the good work on the Linux articles! They keep getting better and better.
ballero - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Great article.you can use "nvidia-settings" (the control panel) to set up both AA and AF
Pannenkoek - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
UT is not a SDL game, but an OpenGL game in Linux. SDL is a library for making graphical applications easier (made by Epic, open source) and is comparable to DirectX excluding Direct3D.Graphics is a weak spot in Linux, mostly due to the fact that NVIDIA and ATi are paranoid to open their hardware spec so no open source cutting edge video drivers can be made. Stable video drivers, now that would be refreshing.
A stable Linux system will never lock completely, but insert proprietary closed source drivers and redirect all input to X and you get pretty close to the Windows experience.
Fortunately there is finally fast development in the X compartment now that Xfree is dying and with Xorg.
Illissius - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Nice article. Mostly mirrors my experience - I haven't been able to get ATi drivers to install at all (this was a few months ago) on either Mandrake, Knoppix (disk install), or Xandros, which was the point at which I gave up and got an nVidia card, and moved to Gentoo at the same time. Installing the drivers was pretty damn easy as far as Gentoo goes* - 'emerge nvidia-glx', add nvidia to the modules autoload list, change the driver in xorg.conf from 'nv' to 'nvidia', and I think that's about it. Of the games I tried (UT2003 demo, UT2004 demo, Wolfenstein: ET) all worked flawlessly, and as far as I can tell the same speed as under Windows. AA/AF worked also - nVidia has a nice graphical control panel for them too (called 'nvidia-settings' in portage); it's not as full featured as their Windows drivers, but it does the job.* What I like about Gentoo is that although you have to setup most things manually, you generally don't have to touch them again after you do. The distro gives you a lot more control over your entire system than 'user friendly' ones like SuSE/Mandrake/Fedora, as well. ie, if you're fascinated with customization, have tried far too many Windows tweak utilities, and can find your way around the registry well enough, there's a good chance it's the distro for you.
Lonyo - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
#3, ATi is generally poorer with OpenGL games than nVidia, and Linux doesn't support DirectX (a Windows thing), so it's fairly obvious that the nVidia cards (which are better at OpenGL), will be better than the equivelant ATi cards (which are generally better at Direct 3D stuff - looking at NV3x vs R3xx)Lonyo - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Have you been working with the 3Dc people? (I notice one of their forum members featuring in a screenshot, an immature one IMO at that ;))Congratulations for putting up a Linux gaming article, it would be nice if you could do older cards though (I was thinking of setting up a machine with a GF4 Ti4400 to run Linux).