Linux 3D AGP GPU Roundup: More Cutting Edge Penguin Performance
by Kristopher Kubicki on October 4, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
Final Thoughts
There are so many more real world examples than just the few benchmarks that we looked at today. We did not cover many Image Quality (IQ) scenarios in this analysis either - particularly since the ATI driver has very limited (non-existent) support with Anisotropic Filtering while our NVIDIA cards just ignored any Anisotropic Filtering commands.You can view our CSV with the performance of each video card from the roundup here.
When we started this review, we had no premonitions on the outcome of some of our video cards. It's true that installing NVIDIA drivers on Linux is almost as painless as installing the drivers on Windows; when the SuSE Yast Online Updates are up to date, installing via the online update is actually easier than Windows. ATI's drivers, on the other hand, gave us several problems - so much so that we actually ended up re-doing the analysis a few times with different kernels/motherboards just to get it right. The lack of 64-bit ATI drivers also prevented us from doing a fair 64-bit binary comparison of our game lineup.
Although we tested only two games under Wine, and one did not work, we cannot call our Wine testing very exhaustive. With more time and energy, we will devote a separate article to analyzing some games just under Wine/Cedega to see how they perform. Jedi Knight performed exceptionally; we were very impressed for a change with how easily something actually worked under Linux. We are interested in Wine's development, but we also anticipate dilemmas that it will soon face against AMD and Intel's virtualization projects. If Intel and AMD successfully create multi-core processors that allow each core to run its own operating system - and they will, given enough time - there may be a large backlash in the Linux gaming community. Users could simply run a copy of Windows (for games) and a copy of Linux (for work) at the same time without rebooting. That is, if they are OK with the price of Windows when such technologies become available. Perhaps more developers will follow in the footsteps of id and Epic, and Linux binaries will become commonplace before multi-OS virtualization squeezes the developers out.
It is important to consider that we were not particularly comparing ATI to NVIDIA in this analysis. Although this analysis did draw some pretty strong lines as to where each card stand, we were more interested in how each game performed compared to their Windows counterparts. We drew a lot of conclusions from one of our more recent video card analyses from July. Surprisingly, most of our NVIDIA video cards scaled very similarly. Wine games like Jedi Knight took a 10% to 15% hit in performance compared to the Windows tests that we did just a few weeks ago. Other games like Unreal Tournament 2004 actually showed mild signs of an increase in frame rate on the NVIDIA graphics cards. Wolfenstein: ET generally performed with similar average FPS to our video cards from 2003. However, keep in mind that the drivers used then were almost a year old.
Medal of Honor: AA and Racer do not have direct Windows benchmarks, but they helped determine a great deal about the scalability of our video cards under Linux. We were happy to see that the ATI cards were capable of keeping pace, even though there were issues with other games. Almost all of ATI's short comings on Linux came from the driver set; lack of Anisotropic Filtering, difficult configuration and few accelerated games were all issues. On the other hand, even though NVIDIA claims support for Anisotropic Filtering, we could not find an instance of it working in our testing.
High performance gaming on Linux certainly isn't for everyone. We spent weeks preparing for this analysis and we still ran into problems that we could not correct. So many times, we came to a solution for a problem only to find our Linux distribution had some files in a slightly different place or our file dependency tree was completely broken. These are the things that scare away people from Linux. Although customizing our own system, contravening the Microsoft "monopoly" and roughing-it-on-our-own were refreshing and challenging, this editor immediately fired up the Tribes: Vengence demo on Windows after the Linux testing and editing were complete. Total time to install and configure: 5 minutes, 40 seconds; now that was refreshing.
During publication of this review, we received some information from ATI about some upcoming Linux announcements which they are working on. We will keep you informed of the details as we hear them.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
33 Comments
View All Comments
- Saturday, October 24, 2009 - link
http://www.goph3r.com/mh">http://www.goph3r.com/mh(air jordan, air max, shox tn, rift, puma, dunk sb, adidas) nike jordan shoes 1-24 $32
lv, coach, chane bag $35
COOGI(jeans, tshirts, hoody, jacket) $30
christian audigier(jeans, tshirts, hoody) $13
edhardy(shoes, tshirts, jeans, caps, watche, handbag) $25
Armani(jeans, tshirts,) $24
AF(jeans, coat, hoody, sweater, tshirts)Abercrombie & Fitch $31
http://www.goph3r.com/mh">http://www.goph3r.com/mh
TheWounded - Monday, November 1, 2004 - link
Its a nice test but i would have loved to see how the XGI volari cards would have done.I'm interested if the volari's could be a good choice for linux gamers. But unfortunatly there are no linux benchmarks involving the volaris.
henca - Thursday, October 7, 2004 - link
This was a very nice comparision of mid- and high-end cards. It would be interesting to also see a comparision with low-end cards like Matrox G550, Intel Extreme graphics and the Radeon 9200 family.The good news about these cards is that they are all supported by the opensource DRI drivers. An up-to-date Linux distribution should support them out of the box without having to download and install any binary drivers.
MNKyDeth - Tuesday, October 5, 2004 - link
I am a Linux gamer only so a benchmark comparison like this is great. I really enjoyed reading it. But, imo, there was a lack of games included in the benchmark roundup. I would like to see Savage, NWN, and either quake3 or Heretic 2 shown aswell.I also do not like the showing of wineX (Cedega) benchmarks as it defeats the purpose the gaming on linux. The only way I could recomend anyone to use wineX (Cedega) is if they don't own a copy of windows. If you do own a copy of windows do not use wineX for pete's sake, just dual boot, it is the better emulator after all.
jerrysiebe - Tuesday, October 5, 2004 - link
For anisotropic filtering, I did a strings search in libGL and came up with something.>strings /usr/lib/libGL.so | grep ANISO
__GL_LOG_MAX_ANISO
Setting that, I can see a visible difference and get a FPS hit, so I believe it works. On my GF4 4200, I can set __GL_LOG_MAX_ANISO to 1, 2, and 4 and see the difference. Set to anything else I get no anisotropic filtering.
Thetargos - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
Excellent article, just a comment on the NVIDIA uninstaller... it plainly doesn't work as it should. The prlblem is that it substitutes (like the ATi driver) some libraries in the system, but unlike ATi's driver, NVIDIA's driver also makes a change in one library used for the Direct Redering Infrastructure, libdri.a specifically. So uninstalling the drivers with NVIDIA's uninstaller this won't be reverted (re-install of the XFree86 package or Xorg package is required, note only the core package is need).In favor of ATi's driver, the uninstallation is much easier and the system is restored to its previous stage, restoring the backup copy of libGL.so.1.2 that is the only system library it overwrites.
plamalice - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
The Nvidia AGPgart driver is causing problems with ATI cards (perhaps other non-nVidia card as well) on both Win and Linux when used on an nForce based mobo (of course). Nforce3 (150, pro150) have both caused me problems when using an ATI card until the gart driver was uninstalled.A poor attempt by nVidia to make ATI card appear unstable ? :P
Anyways, if you have an nForce-based motherboard and an ATI gfx card, do not use nvidia's gart driver.
KristopherKubicki - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
directedition: i just symlink /mnt/cdrom to /media/dvdrecorderKristopher
zainab12345 - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
you can easily play this [Medal Of Honor Download Highly Compressed][1] , check out this blog[1]: https://hdpcgames.com/medal-of-honor-limited-editi...
mczak - Monday, October 4, 2004 - link
"Keep in mind that we even run SuSE, a RPM derivative - not too different from Red Hat."That really doesn't make sense. RPM is just the package manager! If a dos version which uses rpm would exist, would you say that it is "not too different" too?
"Below, you can see a screen grab from our ATI frame buffer playing Unreal Tournament at 800x600. The image should not be surrounded by a black border, but rather, stretched to the limits of the screen."
This looks to me like you did not have configured 800x600 resolution in the Xfree config file (Sax2 will happily do that) - you cannot switch to fullscreen resolutions not configured usually with XFree/Xorg (though maybe the nvidia driver doesn't care).
btw about aniso not working: I guess you could do that quite easily with framegetter? Just intercept the filter setting calls and replace them?