Linux 3D AGP GPU Roundup: More Cutting Edge Penguin Performance
by Kristopher Kubicki on October 4, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Linux
Unreal Tournament 2004
While Wolfenstein is our OpenGL benchmark cornerstone, Unreal Tournament is our SDL cornerstone. We place a lot of weight on our UT2004 benchmarks, since UT is perhaps the largest Linux game released to date. We are anticipating Doom3's Linux release in just a few days, so that may also change things.We used the assault.dem timedemo in this benchmark.
During the timedemos on ATI cards, we occasionally got mild screen corruption in the game console - white flashing triangles ranging anywhere between 100 and 600 pixels long. There seems to be a documented problem with this on various websites, and it looks like the newer versions of the ATI drivers may fix this. Since we could not get the newest drivers working yet, we cannot vouch for this claim.
Below, you can see how the two video cards shaped up during the first eight seconds of the timedemo.
Our FG utility really gives us something to be proud of when we look at graphs like Unreal Tournament. It's true that the average frames per second are lower on ATI cards over their NVIDIA counterparts, but we see a lot of stability in how the card behaves. You'll notice that although the GeForce 6800 ramps up to 40FPS very quickly, it hits a local minimum while the Radeon is just starting to notch up.
The first scene in which both cards clock down can be found below.
Click to enlarge.
The combination of rendering the exterior landscape (large textures) of the cargo hold, the unusual lighting and shading had affected both cards - although it would seem the Radeon cringed first before the landscape was fully revealed. Our player ducks and mainly looks at the ground for a second or so after this, and you can see the NVIDIA card really ramp up in that half second.
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KristopherKubicki - Monday, October 04, 2004 - link
Ziast: Fixed.Kristopher Reply
Ziast - Monday, October 04, 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. Reply
Papineau - Monday, October 04, 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. Reply
Term - Monday, October 04, 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. Reply
Cygni - Monday, October 04, 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. Reply
ViRGE - Monday, October 04, 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. Replyraylpc - Monday, October 04, 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. Reply
Saist - Monday, October 04, 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. Reply
sprockkets - Monday, October 04, 2004 - link
Yep, the SuSE 9.2 folder is really fresh and of course probably will work ok when 9.2 comes out.What do you mean when you say SuSE is a Red Hat derivative? Is that because of RPM?
Did SATA work on SuSE 9.1 for the nforce3 board?
Guess the only thing I can say is I run a Radeon 9200 with the built in drivers in SuSE 9.1 with no problem, but haven't tested a game with it yet...
What sucks in Linux? Trying to change those wonderful settings for your x86config to use those spiffy AA/AF settings. Gettings real games to work. I wonder if SuSE will even use the newer xfree86 version, or what they will switch to as well.
Sigh, need to keep good old win2k for such gaming purposes... Reply
gleb42 - Monday, October 04, 2004 - link
Nice article, but"we want to look at some common graphics intensive applications for Linux and determine how well they run, particularly in relation to their Windows counterparts."
where exactly is this windows/linux comparison. I only found a couple of words on the Wine section (and wine has it's own overhead, so that's not entirely fair comparison...)
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