PA on Linux kinda sucks

Nvidia drivers are same as on Windows.

AMD drivers have platform-specific bugs and for my card overall performance is 70-80% of Windows drivers. AMD also support opensource drivers.

Intel have only opensource drivers and for HD cards it's actually extremely good drivers. They are extremely stable and fast for non-gaming purposes. Performance is mostly same with Windows version, but you know what is Intel iGPU is. :mrgreen:

glad I have Nvidia then.

The proprietary drivers on Linux are called fglrx, and yes, its basically identical. Anything that screws up on Linux should also screw up on Windows.

That isn't true anymore. Before AMD started calling it Catalyst for Linux, it was based on a different code tree. Now, they use the same code as the Windows drivers and keep it in sync.

Yes, AMD has spent approximately $3 million dollars on FOSS driver development.

Nvidia has stated that they will not be supporting Wayland, so in about a year and a half you won't be able to use Nvidia hardware in Linux unless you want to use novaeu (which has considerably slower development than the radeon and intel drivers).

Apple wrote the entire GL/driver stack in OSX, and AMD contributes to a very small part of it (the lowest layer of the HAL, and that binary blob is written explicitly for OSX).

Apple basically doesn't care about games or OpenGL using programs, although they keep putting in token effort to keep it working.

But Linux driver developer in other country and by other group of people. It's can't have same level of sync as Nvidia driver.
And actually there is many platform-specific code in Catalyst.

he's saying (if I follow correctly) that due to the switchover to Wayland display server protocal and library AMD would become the better alternative once again in a couple years?

No, it's won't happen so fast. This is just another holywar about display servers, but you really don't need to care about it. It's only mater for advanced Linux users and fanatics.

Everyone else can use LTS (Long Term Support) releases which which is supported for 5 years. So even if Ubuntu 14.04 (April 2014) will be last LTS shipped with traditional Xorg support (which won't happen, imho) you'll able to use it till april of 2019.

So if you want use Linux as simple user/gamer you can just ignore that's all.

thanks.

The only platform-specific code is to deal with X or Linux, not specifically GL. You're unlikely to hit a bug in a GL app that crashes on Linux but doesn't on Windows that can't also be triggered in a non-GL app.

I can say that both drivers (Nvidia and AMD) got enough quality to not crash on normal OpenGL 3.x game like PA, but when we talk about 3D drivers it's always question of quality, not about stability. And sadly for AMD their drivers show much more graphical glitches.

Yes/no. AMD drivers follow the GL specification more strictly, and thanks to Nvidia's "pay the developers in hardware and whores" program, developers use Nvidia and rarely test on AMD at all until its already shipped. If anything, Nvidia's drivers are buggier than **** for allowing the games to work right to begin with.

Let's just keep discussion about this particular game. I don't really care what proprietary are theoretically follow specification better, but fact is:

• Nvidia - no glitches.
• Mesa 3D - no glitches.
• AMD - have glitches.

I'm kind of getting sick of this whole "AMD drivers suck on Linux" myth people seem to believe. It was certainly true years ago, but AMD has made a lot of improvements since, and currently their proprietary drivers are quite good indeed. (In fact, some cards reach performance parity with windows, as was already mentioned.) I have 3 computers running different generations of AMD cards, and all three run flawlessly using AMD's proprietary drivers. Open drivers are another matter, and while the oldest of my cards runs fairly well with the open drivers, the new ones are still getting there. However, with the adoption of the new Gallium drivers, I expect future AMD cards to do quite well on Linux with open drivers. (In fact, the 8000 series are expected to run very well with open drivers.)

In any case, I haven't had any problems running PA on Linux at all, but I haven't had time to test the latest version with the planet editor, so I may be behind in the times. Still, I don't expect I'd run into any major issues.

Yes, and Mesa has no glitches BECAUSE of AMD. AMD has admitted that ATI made a mistake in writing the drivers to begin with, and should have relied on support from the OS to make it work. With Mesa, this happens. Its why they've spent $3m on development to finally kill **** drivers forever.

Plus traditional Mesa 3D is being phased out for Gallium 3D, which is the ideal method for implementing graphics drivers on Linux anyway. AMD is supporting it heavily with their open drivers, which means their driver development will be a lot easier in the future. Meanwhile, NVidia has no interest in open drivers, so the only support they have for Gallium is through Nouveau. Even Intel, as great as their graphics support on Linux is, still hasn't adopted Gallium.

The future in graphics cards on Linux definitely looks brightest for AMD, ignoring all the fanboyism that seems to perpetuate amongst the graphic card crowd.

Problem is there is no future for old graphics card, and support of actual generation is way behind in open source drivers. Intel and AMD cards are better choice for long run, but here I'm talking about games.

Then you really lucky because for me proprietary drivers have serious VSync issues in newer versions and weird graphical glitches in older.
And that's differently not Uber fault.

In that area, AMD (and Intel) still have the lead. NVidia has dropped support for many of its old graphics cards, not releasing subsequent drivers, which means that as soon as you upgrade to a new kernel, your card becomes useless. Admittedly, AMD does this with their proprietary drivers too, but they have the open drivers to fall back on, and for the older AMD videocards, these actually work better than the proprietary drivers did anyway.

And as for your vsync issues and glitches, those are on an AMD card, right? What distro?