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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

For those who, like me, use desktop Linux full time, Valve's close collaboration with NVIDIA and AMD (i.e., ATI) to improve the performance of proprietary graphics drivers is a huge win.

Quoting from the blog post: "We’ve been working with NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel to improve graphic driver performance on Linux. They have all been great to work with and have been very committed to having engineers on-site working with our engineers, carefully analyzing the data we see. We have had very rapid turnaround on any bugs we find and it has been invaluable to have people who understand the game, the renderer, the driver, and the hardware working alongside us when attacking these performance issues."

Leaving aside the amazing fact that Valve is achieving higher FPS on Linux than on Windows, the great thing about efforts like this one is that we can all expect the Linux desktop to become even smoother, faster, more seamless. I love it!

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Seems to me like a huger win would be if the open-source graphics drivers would get improved.

I'm not even talking ideologically here. The OSS drivers are included along with the kernel in most distros. They're what you get by default when you boot a new Linux install. They get upgraded alongside other core packages by the distro's package manager and are generally quite up-to-date compared to the "official" drivers in the package repository (if they're even there at all).

I use the OSS radeon driver at home and the OSS nouveau driver at work, and both are quite adequate for my purposes (which involve no real 3D). I think it would be a bigger improvement to the ecosystem to have these drivers get some love.

(Or, alternately, for the proprietary drivers to go open-source and be included with the kernel).

nathanb: Yes, that would be ideal. The way I think about it is this: even though this effort falls far short of the ideal with NVIDIA and AMD, it's still a huge win for the platform.

> Seems to me like a huger win would be if the open-source graphics drivers would get improved.

Their work with Intel is on the open source drivers.

Show me where I can buy an Intel graphics card. Please.

Near as I can tell, the only Intel display adapters are the ones integrated into laptop motherboards. You may be able to buy the occasional desktop motherboard with integrated Intel graphics, but good luck finding one that can support two DVI monitors or dual-link high-resolution displays or anything fancy like that.

However, the last I looked into this was a while back; perhaps the situation has improved?

Well, as of ~5 years ago, nobody except power users have desktop computers. Laptops have become the "default" type of computer, and almost all of those have a graphics chip integrated directly to the CPU, not to the motherboard like olden days.

Everyone I know thats in college or below has laptops this is true. But all my family and friends that are ~30+ and not working in IT have desktops at home. I can assure you none of them are power users.

They're not integrated into the motherboards, they're built directly into the CPU. This reduces power consumption and allows the motherboard to shrink, no separate component needed.

The HD4000 isn't the most capable chipset on the market but for most applications, light-duty use, it's fine. Even the basic versions of this chipset could support two 24" screens without much trouble. Just don't expect benchmark-shattering 3D performance.

My impression is that there are issues with 3rd party licensing of various sorts in the proprietary drivers that would prevent open sourcing them even if Nvidia/AMD wanted to.

Of course that probably doesn't prevent them from giving the OSS drivers some love, but that is another story.

The genesis of this was back in 2006 when Microsoft started requiring graphics board/chip makers to keep some aspects of their design secret, to support DRM in Vista. That includes hardware details and code, i.e. open source drivers. See http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

I'm actually quite glad that adequate drivers are available, even if they're not open source. That outcome wasn't guaranteed.

It goes further back than that. The software stack for all modern AMD GPUs is based on the original unified shader compiler for the first AMD unified shader GPU, Xenos (XBOX360) written largely by Microsoft. AMD just has a license to the code, MS still owns it.

Any sources for that software stack part? Only information I managed to find was that AMD was contracted to create Xenos core, but there was no mentions who made software (I would assume AMD) and especially no information about licensing.

nVidias argument for not opening up the Linux driver is that it shares a lot of code with the Windows driver. I'm not saying that this argument makes sense, but it's the one they use.

I don't understand why that prevents them from releasing the source? There's no reason the Windows driver need be closed-source.

That depends, how much of their competitive advantage over AMD is in software and how much of it is hardware?

Or at least documenting the hardware.

I might be waving hands here, but I got impression that actual components that do raw processing in GPU are not that complex. Complex part (and which produces the performance) is the pipeline feeding data into those units. GPUs are also programmable chips so even publishing driver that shows how graphic stack on GPU side is set up could potentially reveal whole architecture of that chip.

I thought their argument was that some non-trivial amount of code in their driver is licensed somehow and they're thus not free to open source it. It sharing code with the Windows driver is the explanation for how that code got into the Linux driver to begin with.

> For those who, like me, use desktop Linux full time, [...] is a huge win.

Well I don't know... For the sake of attracting more users, Linux usage tends to become more and more Windows-like. Best illustration is the dropping of network transparency in Wayland because "most people don't care".

I suspect that there is going to be more and more concessions like this.

bnegreve: X.org-like network transparency falls outside the scope of Wayland, so it was never really dropped as a feature.

Moreover, as I understand it, you will be able to run X.org as a Wayland client, so you're not losing anything compared to today's setup. (IOW, you will be able to run remote X11 apps transparently over the network on a Wayland server.) Not only that, but Wayland clients can use any other network protocol -- VNC, RDP, etc.

IMO Wayland too is a big win for the Linux desktop.

> you will be able to run X.org as a Wayland client

Not really, application developed over X.org control the display through a drawing API. This is why network transparency (among other things) is so simple. If people start developing application for Wayland this won't be that simple/elegant.

We are dropping a level of indirection for performance purpose. This is quite unique in the history.

Personally, I prefer VNC to X's network transparency, because all my applications don't get closed if my internet connection drops.

How do better graphics drivers have anything to do with making concessions to become more Windows-like? Or is it using Linux as a full-time desktop operating system you're objecting to?

Better graphics are great, but it's hard to believe that nVidia or Valve will release open source software that can be installed/tested/bugrepported through a package manager.

This is a big lose for stability and usability. Fetching untested software and installing it manually is very Windows-like.

This is huge. 2013 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop. :P

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