Revisiting Linux GPUs: Playing the Driver Game

Final Thoughts

Both next generation driver sets add significant performance increases to the ATI and NVIDIA video card lineup on Linux. Unfortunately, just looking at the list of known issues in both readme files tends to give the feeling that there is still a long way to go. NVIDIA's to-do list seems fairly mundane; most issues exist with multi-display desktops. ATI's list, while shorter, looks more menacing - "fix screen corruption problems and crashes". Granted, we did not have any errors with screen corruption or crashes on ATI drivers this time around, but we have experienced some screen corruption issues in the past. Perhaps an even greater accomplishment for both vendors today were that the performance increases in today's analysis came without any crashing or unanticipated rendering behavior.

Still missing from ATI's official to-do list is 64-bit support. Not having a 64-bit driver is cutting into an ever growing portion of the Linux market share. Considering that virtually every main Linux distribution has a 64-bit branch and a 32-bit branch these days, ATI has some ground to catch up on. Virtually every new system that we recommend (and particularly on Linux) revolves around the Athlon 64 bit core. While performance gains between 32-bit and 64-bit distributions on Unreal Tournament 2004 were meager, the code base for most Linux applications has increased to the point where you won't feel any performance decreases going from 32-bit to 64-bit anymore (but that's another article for another day).

As far as measured performance goes, NVIDIA did a lot to increase their lead today. While ATI's drivers (at least in the 32-bit realm) are shaping up to make their hardware much more viable, the newest 1.0-6629 set gave us astonishing performance gains. As we saw (again) in almost every benchmark, NVIDIA continued to build their case as the vastly stronger brand on Linux hardware.