Intel Linux Driver Now Nearly As Fast As Windows OpenGL Driver 113
An anonymous reader writes "Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver is now running neck-and-neck with the Windows 8.1 driver for OpenGL performance between the competing platforms when using the latest drivers for each platform. The NVIDIA driver has long been able to run at similar speeds between Windows and Linux given the common code-base, but the Intel Linux driver is completely separate from their Windows driver due to being open-source and complying with the Linux DRM and Mesa infrastructure. The Intel Linux driver is still trailing the Windows OpenGL driver in supporting OpenGL4."
Re:Linux DRM (Score:5, Informative)
This is the problem with using DRM and other 3-letter acronyms in the article body; they become quite ambiguous.
Yup. Direct Rendering Manager [freedesktop.org], not Digital Rights Management.
(Having worked on Server Message Block protocol implementations, seeing "SMB" stand for "Small and Medium Businesses" gives my brain heartburn. :-))
NOT neck and neck (Score:4, Informative)
The headline is bad/misleading - many of those benchmarks are showing a disparity of more than 10% between the drivers. Using the numbers from the Phoronix article, Linux results are the highest number from any Linux driver (there are many cases where the most recent driver was not the best) to try and prove headline:
Linux = [35.88, 140.90, 43.37, 23.5, 32.23, 19.17, 25.17, 16.68, 99.24, 63.94, 46.80, 29.46]
Windows = [41.47, 162.88, 36.57, 27.0, 31.46, 19.37, 24.47, 16.85, 104.04, 65.15, 55.05, 36.63]
for i in range(len(Linux)):
diff = abs(round((1 - Linux[i]/Windows[i])*100, 1))
"Windows win by %d.1%%" % (diff) if Linux[i] < Windows[i] else "Linux . win by %d.1%%" % (diff)
'Windows win by 13.1%'
'Windows win by 13.1%'
'Linux . win by 18.1%'
'Windows win by 13.1%'
'Linux . win by 2.1%'
'Windows win by 1.1%'
'Linux . win by 2.1%'
'Windows win by 1.1%'
'Windows win by 4.1%'
'Windows win by 1.1%'
'Windows win by 15.1%'
'Windows win by 19.1%'
So out of 12 results, 5 showed a 10%+ difference between Linux and Windows Intel drivers in favour of Windows and 1 showed a 10%+ difference in favour of Linux. The conclusion that the drivers are neck and neck does not follow from the premise for around 40% of the results and that's when being unfairly generous to Linux!