Linux 3D AGP GPU Roundup: More Cutting Edge Penguin Performance
by Kristopher Kubicki on October 4, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
Let's Talk about Drivers
Installing a dozen video cards with various sets of drivers was the largest annoyance for us during the testing of this review. Obviously, due to license restrictions, NVIDIA and ATI drivers must be installed after the initial OS installation, and cannot be packaged with the kernel. For Windows users not familiar with the process, the kernel module or driver wrapper must be completely recompiled for closed source drivers to work.NVIDIA's drivers are not only supported via SuSE's YOU (the YAST Online Updater), but the drivers easily plug into SuSE without any trouble. We just installed our kernel source, hit init 3, ran the 1.0-6111 binary install, and then followed the instructions on the screen. NVIDIA's drivers provide DRI-like support via SaX2 (the SuSE X configuration tool) as well. Typical video cards us the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) for 3D accelerated graphics. The DRI acts as somewhat of an abstraction layer between X Windows and OpenGL. NVIDIA actually uses their own DRI-like module outside of the standard DRI module. Without DRI or NVIDIA's modules, we are only running software acceleration.
ATI's drivers came out of the box with several problems. We made the initial mistake of installing and testing the entire suite of video cards with the NVIDIA cards/drivers first. We are not entirely sure why, but even after completely removing the NVIDIA kernel module via NVIDIA's uninstall scripts, we still had persistent errors installing the ATI drivers correctly.
Our first test bed was an nForce3 MSI Socket 939 board. We isolated some of our problems to the agpgart module - for older ATI drivers, we need to load a separate specific AGP module on SuSE 9.1 for DRI to load correctly. 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. Some of the issues stem from SuSE 9.1 not recognizing the nForce3 chipset correctly, but some issues may stem from ATI drivers just not recognizing everything correctly. After switching to a Socket 939 VIA motherboard, our problems suddenly disappeared. Of course, we had to re-test our entire NVIDIA suite on the new motherboard (we saved it for last the second time around).
Even by switching to a different motherboard, we were not entirely blessed. Using ATI's driver set from their website yielded some results, but first, we made the mistake of using the fglrx package from ATI's website. ATI's implementation of the X Windows configuration completely upsets SaX2, and X will simply ignore the DRI module when we try to load it. Somewhere between playing with various kernel builds, driver builds and hardware configurations, we finally got it right. Our best success with newest SuSE 9.2-RC3 kernel[1] came from using the RPMs and instructions on the supplement FTP site. The 2.6.8 kernel blew away our boot configuration a few times; for whatever reason, VIA SATA controllers are now recognized as SCSI controllers to the new Linux kernel. Without getting too much into detail, we needed to re-edit our mtab, fstab and grub configuration to a different device; the serial ATA drives suddenly became SCSI drives. We finally no longer had errors on the agpgart driver:
linux:~ # dmesg | grep agpgart Linux agpgart interface v0.100 (c) Dave Jones agpgart: Detected AGP bridge 0 agpgart: Maximum main memory to use for agp memory: 941M agpgart: AGP aperture is 128M @ 0xf0000000 linux:~ #
Footnote
[1] 2.6.8-14-default, you can download it from the SuSE FTP site in the update directory.
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adt6247 - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Good article. The one thing that I thought was lacking is the comparison to FPS's under Windows. That would be incredibly useful.One more thing -- nVidia actually has a graphical configuration panel for Linux. I forget what it's called; I use it all the time to set AA/AF settings on my box, but my machine is at home, and I'm at work now. I'll post later with the name of the binary.
adt6247 - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
KristopherKubicki - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Ziast: Fixed.Kristopher
Ziast - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Nice article except for this glaring mistake:"All in all, just getting the ATI drivers on something that isn't Red Hat feels like way too much work for basic OpenGL support. Keep in mind that we even run SuSE, a Red Hat derivative."
SuSe Linux was first released in 1993. Red Hat Linux was not released until 1994. Just because SuSe uses RPM doesn't mean it's a Red Hat derivative.
Papineau - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Two RFEs, one for the article, the other for FG.For the article: Would it be possible to graph the ratio of FPS from one card to the other one over time? That would help to know if a card is "always 1.5 times faster than the other", or "sometimes even, sometimes faster, usually slower than the other".
For FG: Why modify the executable file? Why not use LD_PRELOAD/LD_LIBRARY_PATH to load the lib you want to insert (libFG), and then have it call the system's libGL and libSDL? It seems a bit "bad practice" to modify the benchmarked executable.
Term - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
#6I get more FPS with Linux in both Quake1(World) and Quake3 (single and dual cpu) then with Windows2000. Thow I suspect that if you have a newer card then you might not, due to the drivers.
Cygni - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
When 64bit Windows finally ships, and the entire Athlon64 and Opteron user base switches over, including many gamers, the pressure will be on for ATI, and judging by how good their driver team has been in the 32bit Win sector these last few months, hopefully they can rise to the challenge.As far as Linux drivers for speed? I hate to break the news to alot of people, but gaming on Linux is a HUGE chore with little payoff. Ive spent HOURS with clean installs of Mandrake to play games I already have for Windows... only to, of course, see that they are slower than their windows counterpart. Linux is great for alot of stuff, and ive always got a computer somewhere running Mandrake 9.1... but it just ISNT for gaming right now, which I think the review helped illustrate nicely.
ViRGE - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
I wouldn't be too excited about ATI's 64bit Linux plans, let alone even their 64bit Windows plans. Their only 64bit drivers are over 4 months old, and don't support any of the X-series of cards, which really limits their usefulness. ATI has said before that they may not ship another build until some time in 2005.raylpc - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
"we received some information from ATI about some upcoming Linux announcements which they are working on"I remember ATi is working on some "plan", so the actual driver release could be way after. Well, nvidia is probably the next card I'm going to get.
Saist - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
my first thought was:how in the world can an Geforce FX MATCH and BEAT the R300 architecture. I guess if you ever wanted empirical proof that ATi has ignored Linux, this is it.