The Truth About OpenGL Driver Quality 158
rcht148 (2872453) writes "Rich Geldreich (game/graphics programmer) has made a blog post on the quality of different OpenGL Drivers. Using anonymous titles (Vendor A: Nvidia; Vendor B: AMD; Vendor C: Intel), he plots the landscape of game development using OpenGL. Vendor A, jovially known as 'Graphics Mafia' concentrates heavily on performance but won't share its specifications, thus blocking any open source driver implementations as much as possible. Vendor B has the most flaky drivers. They have good technical know-how on OpenGL but due to an extremely small team (money woes), they have shoddy drivers. Vendor C is extremely rich. It had not taken graphics seriously until a few years ago. They support open source specifications/drivers wholeheartedly but it will be few years before their drivers come to par with market standards. He concludes that using OpenGL is extremely difficult and without the blessings of these vendors, it's nearly impossible to ship a major gaming title."
Re:Nvidia blows too with drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
Boy I miss PowerVR, S3, 3DFX Vodoo, and Matrox.
I don't, having to code for OpenGL, Direct3D, Glide, Rendition and MSI to optimally support all the different vendors on the market was a huge PITA. Though I do agree that the competition was so fierce that technology was bounding forward at a brilliant pace! ...and that part I do miss.
Re:Nvidia blows too with drivers (Score:4, Insightful)
ATI is catching up and are competitive. NVidia lowered the price and made their Quadro turn into the Titan serious to counter the ATi 290x.
Good for consumers. However, their drivers are shit. ATI's drivers have improved then had issues again with frame pacing and mantle on older AMD chipsets. Nvidia had some questionable hardware and now worse drivers which are unstable and Windows 8/8.1 HATE. They do not even support all of directX 11.1 which is the cause of the crashes.
Part of me feels ATI and Nvidia are doing this on purpose so they can sell the remarked gamer cards as FirePRo's and Quadro's for real professional work yada yada at an expensive price. I mean if it is so bad even for 2d Adobe apps you need a $2,000 card just so video artificats do not pop up you know you have trouble.
Or maybe I am cynical to think of a conspiracy to sell professional grade cards more with real opengl of course.
Re:OpenGL drivers on other platforms (Score:1, Insightful)
So why do people keep writing letters instead of the firm names? Everybody knows that Apple (Q) is unresponsive to bug reports, but saying so won't make black choppers fly over your basement.