Steam for Linux

Steam for Linux

Will open source display drivers ever be as good as propriety?
I heard that Valve was planning to help improve both open source and proprietary display drivers on Linux. I know where to find beta AMD proprietary drivers. Is there someone to download and try beta open source display drivers; and if so, is it worth exploring or is there likely no way to compete with proprietary drivers when it comes to high end 3D rendering?
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Showing 1-15 of 18 comments
https://launchpad.net/~oibaf/+archive/graphics-drivers/
Unswering to your question - probably never
Evil Penguin Dec 13, 2012 @ 1:23am 
Will performance ever be as good?
Unlikely.
noobslayer69 Dec 13, 2012 @ 4:31am 
Originally posted by HarlemSquirrel:
I heard that Valve was planning to help improve both open source and proprietary display drivers on Linux.

Yes and no -- what they meant (please someone correct me if I'm wrong, I promise I won't get mad) is they want to improve the proprietary drivers of AMD and Nvidia and the open source driver for Intel.
Letalis Sonus Dec 13, 2012 @ 9:09am 
Well, with R500 based cards the free driver is already on par with the last supported fglrx version.

After all the free drivers still have more potential performance, moving large parts of the driver into kernel space ought to have a pretty good influence.
Dusk of Oolacile Dec 13, 2012 @ 1:19pm 
For current hardware probably never. For ancient cards it surely will.
HarlemSquirrel Dec 13, 2012 @ 2:36pm 
So I am getting the vibe here that we should use proprietary drivers as long as the latest release supports our cart, then look to open source. I suppose that makes sense: you pay money to a company in exchange for their physical display adapter AND their software drivers.
Letalis Sonus Dec 14, 2012 @ 6:38pm 
AMD recently published some patches for the free driver, they'll eventually end up in the 3.8 kernel. Some refinement and propper user space support is still needed, though.

First tests showed that some games may gain massive performance improvements, as in x10 (from 20 to 227 FPS in Smokin Guns with a HD 5750): http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_drm38_radeon&num=1
El Pollo Santos Dec 14, 2012 @ 10:49pm 
Considering how lousy AMD's drivers are... maybe
Schrödinger's cat Dec 15, 2012 @ 12:48am 
Originally posted by Letalis Sonus:
AMD recently published some patches for the free driver, they'll eventually end up in the 3.8 kernel
Can I test it?
Letalis Sonus Dec 15, 2012 @ 5:13am 
You'd need to compile the Kernel + Mesa yourself. I really wouldn't recommend it. That new A-Sync DMA support isn't even done, yet, those were really just rudimentary tests which may still suffer from several bugs and other caveats. While the patches themselves have been tested intensively for months by AMD, some of the missing parts are rather essential.
matthewharvey Dec 18, 2012 @ 9:41am 
If you really wanted to get the open source drivers at their latest, you could try adding the PPA xorg-edgers following instructions here https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa. That's assuming you're on Ubuntu.

Unless that's what you really want to do though, then I would suggest not doing it. Right now, the AMD open source drivers are worse in general than the proprietary ones (and that doesn't show any signs of changing). The proprietary ones are worse for kernel developers, because they can't be added to the kernel source tree, and can't be kept up to date properly. That's why you have to add them yourself. This has implications for long term support, in that AMD will probably not have proprietary drivers for you in the long term, and legacy support is generally dropped pretty quickly. That's why some of us make a choice to support the free drivers now in hopes of having something good to fall back on in the future.

Intel develops their drivers open source, in tandem with the kernel developers, so their only drivers are the open source ones, and that is the reason that my next laptop will feature a nifty Intel HD 4000. But Valve is just working on getting the best drivers that they can, and if that means working on the non-free ones, then that's what they're going to do. That being said, the Intel and AMD open source drivers share a fair amount of code, so them helping the Intel drivers will indirectly help the AMD ones as well.
HarlemSquirrel Dec 18, 2012 @ 5:08pm 
Thanks, matthewharvey! Thet is quite informative. I have been trying the different drivers and am running into system instability issues. I really don't want to have to reinstall my os because I tried a bunch of different display drivers. ugh
medwards Dec 20, 2012 @ 5:10am 
We're only saying that the radeon driver is worse performance-wise that fglrx, right? Because in terms of just making sure my desktop works as expected radeon is far ahead. Even jockey installed fglrx fails completely to let me do dual-screen with my laptop.
okoyl Dec 20, 2012 @ 6:41am 
i got another computer with HD5450, fglrx and fglrx from xorg-edgers can't operate Opengl. so i can't use stuff like xbmc.. i need to work with radeon driver instaed. that sickens me.
leralfonso Dec 22, 2012 @ 8:36am 
All these problems only tell me -as a regular user, not computer expert- that it is just useless to have Steam installed on my Laptop with AMD MHD4330. Because all the games i have doesn't need Steam to be installed and the "Steam games" just don't work (i mean, bF3, TF2,...). I have 6 or 9 GB of HDD for the TF2 waiting for nothing, because of my nice legacy driver... If i can manage to buy some day a new computer, it will be Intel + Nvidia.
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