Intel's Linux OpenGL Driver Faster Than Apple's OS X Driver

An anonymous reader writes "The open-source Intel Linux graphics driver has hit a milestone of now being faster than Apple's own OpenGL stack on OS X. The Intel Linux driver on Ubuntu 13.04 is now clearly faster than Apple's internally-developed Intel OpenGL driver on OS X 10.8.3. when benchmarked from a 'Sandy Bridge' class Mac Mini. Only some months ago, Apple's GL driver was still trouncing the Intel Linux Mesa driver."

Accuracy?

[MoronGames]

Okay, so now we know that the drivers themselves are faster at rendering OpenGL content, but are they accurate? I know that, in the past, both AMD and nVidia have resorted to not quite properly rendering things to get their cards to perform better in benchmarks, does anyone know if any of that is going on here?

Re:why is this news?

[aliquis]

No-one said it was shocking?

However the drivers for the open-source OS is good. Not only for the proprietarian one. That's nice.

osx is not all that

[kcmastrpc]

It's actually starting to show its age. I've recently switched back to windows 8 (with classic shell) and will probably never give OSX the time of day again. The fact that I have to go back to the main screen to do anything with the menu bar, task bar, and a file manager that hasn't changed in 15 years started driving me insane. There were some other quirks as well - like the END key doing something completely different in every single application I used that drove me to switch. In any case, I tried it, for a few years actually. I'm not trolling, I just think that Apple has dropped the ball with the OSX UI/UX - in favor of developing all their iGadgets.

Sigh

[Sycraft-fu]

When you post stuff like that, and fanboys mod it to +5, it looks really silly. The reason isn't because it is not true, but because it is not impressive. Yes, Linux has a few games for it including some older Source games. Yay. Trying to imply that because it has Steam it has games is silly. Roughly 6 of my 163 Steam games will run on Linux and most of those are the older Source engine games.

Having Steam doesn't mean you get games. It means there's a platform to sell games on that many Linux users will hate on (costs money, has DRM, no source code). The games themselves have to be ported and so far, not much of that has been going on.

It does not strengthen your point when you go and make a rather silly argument. The "but it has Steam!" argument that keeps getting trotted out when someone comments on Linux and gaming reminds me of Mac users back in the 90s pointing to the 10 or so old titles you could find in the store as proof that there were plenty of games on the Mac.

Linux gaming is not in a good state currently, and trying to mask that is silly.

Re:That's great news!

[Anonymous Coward]

The real question is how fast the Windows driver is...

Re:Great!

[Anubis IV]

I just popped open the Mac App Store and took a glance at the first page of games. Just to name a few that were listed, there's Borderlands 2, CoD: Black Ops, Batman: Arkham City, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Civ V, Bioshock, Amnesia, Witcher 2, Assassin's Creed II, and XCOM: Enemy Unknown. And if I pop open my copy of Steam, I can find pretty much all of Valve's titles, as well as a whole lot more. Granted, they're not all the latest and greatest (e.g. Bioshock, not Infinite; AC2, not AC3; Black Ops, not Black Ops II), but it's a wide selection of well-known games from a number of developers.

Jokes like yours are funniest when they use humor to take the edge off of a point that would otherwise be painful to swallow, but yours is simply off the mark entirely. Unreal, Source, Gamebryo, id Tech, IW, and Unity engines all work with OpenGL and have a number of games out using it. There are strong rumors that Crytek already has an in-house version of CryEngine 3 running with OpenGL, and based on job listings at DICE, it looks like they're porting their Frostbite engine over as well for use with Battlefield.

Given the disappointment that some of the major game developers have expressed (e.g. Gabe Newell's public statements) towards Windows 8, along with Microsoft's signals that DirectX may be at its end of life, is it really any surprise that all of the major game engines have already been ported or are in the process of being ported to OpenGL? Even more so when you consider that the two major smartphone OSes (i.e. the platforms on which most games today are now played) only make use of OpenGL? Not to mention that on gaming devices that support one or both of OpenGL or DirectX, all but one of those devices (Xbox) supports OpenGL in addition to or to the exclusion of DirectX? And the fact that Linux is quickly gaining recognition as a high-performance gaming platform and is getting some love from developers and publishers? Finally, is it really all of that surprising that the developers are actually making use of these game engines to put games on as many devices as possible?

Mind you, I'm not suggesting that DirectX should be abandoned, by any means, since it's still quite powerful and is still the library that's used on one of the major consoles out today. All I mean to do is point out the folly in your assertion that OpenGL is not being utilized in games.

Re:That's great news!

[drinkypoo]

My phone runs Linux. [...] No CompileKernel WorkOutDependancies nonsense.

My phone runs Linux, too. The stock kernel is abysmal crap, so I run an upgraded kernel. Since it's a superbitch to build new kernels for many Android devices, I let someone else do the dirty work. Back in the early days of PCs I would just build my own kernel at the drop of a hat, but now I literally cannot build a new kernel for my phone. I can't even get an Android source tree because git is shit. So I've gained convenience, but I've lost flexibility. Don't pretend that nothing has been lost.

With that said, Android is pretty damned mainstream.