[velodrome]

Gaming on Linux still has a long way to go:

1) The drivers are still crappy. It's getting better but it still needs a lot of work. To simply manage multiple screens or to change resolution requires a restart! Nvidia is still better than AMD drivers.

2) Many games just get the Linux ports to a "working" condition and leave it at that. The games are really buggy. Valve games are top notch and deserve a lot of credit for creating a good experience. Thank you Valve.

3) Ubuntu needs to create a stable platform people can build on. Getting people to use LTS is good but it is still buggy (I have a lot of issues with Unity). Also, LTS software gets stale really quickly - there needs to be a solution for this (without PPAs).

[codygman]

1. Changing resolutions requires a restart for you? Why in the world would that be? Do you use ubuntu? Do you have to save settings with the GUI and then restart?

For instance I run a shell script which does some xrandr commands to make my external desktop work on Xubuntu (same for debian).

2. Agreed

3. LTS means more stable and packages are more tested. Getting newer packages will mean testing less, meaning less stable packages.

I think I better solution is game developers using the newest stable version of dependencies on popular LTS's instead of using newer ones just because. Basically this requires communication between game devs and linux package maintainers for mesa/xorg/nvidia/fglrx.

[velodrome]

Yes, I use Ubuntu but I am considering moving to Debian or Suse.

To be fair, changing resolution does not always require a restart (but for my multi-monitor setup it often does). I can do most changes without a restart with Nvidia not AMD. Also, why should I change the resolution within the driver software...why not do it in the desktop like Windows or OSX.

I am really curious to know how Intel graphics drivers work on linux. Intel seems to be more linux friendly compared to AMD/Nvidia. Is the support a lot better?

[claudius]

> I am really curious to know how Intel graphics drivers work on linux. Intel seems to be more linux friendly compared to AMD/Nvidia. Is the support a lot better?

They ‘just work’ – you can change the resolution/screen setup any way you like at any time, either using xrandr directly or one of the many frontends (each DE usually has one called ‘Display Settings’). Of course, the drawback is that these are still just Intel on-die GPUs; enough for Portal (2), CS etc., but even KSP runs rather slowly/only at low details.

[codygman]

My intel gpu:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09)

actually doesn't just work. I think it says "DP error slip" or something similar. That reminds me I need to submit a bug report ;)

[stormbrew]

Intel drivers, lack of horsepower aside, are much better than either nvidia or amd at this point. You do not need to restart X to change resolutions or manage screens, it's just an xrandr command. It works very well.

That said, a lot of games on linux deal extremely poorly with multimon no matter what. They'll usually try to play over all screens with sometimes completely insane geometries.

[noinsight]

> Intel drivers, lack of horsepower aside, are much better than either nvidia or amd at this point.

Sadly I have to disagree with you at this point. I used the Intel GPU on my i7 2600k (HD3000) since 2011 on Arch Linux and at some point about six months ago they stopped working properly. On a Displayport connector I didn't get video at all @ boot sometimes, other than by messing with xrandr and unplugging the cable the only solution was to try booting again.

That wasn't too horrible. What was horrible was the fact that OpenGL didn't work at all really. Every time I used anything that utilized OpenGL I would get "GPU hung, stuck in render ring blah blah" in my dmesg every minute or so and indeed the whole GPU and hence the screens would freeze completely for 5 seconds or so. The machine became unusable. No more GPU accelerated mplayer after that (vaapi or any of the opengl options). Google Maps with WebGL was especially hilarious, I only had to drag with the mouse a bit to make the GPU hang.

I tolerated it for a few driver versions but no improvement happened so I bought a passively cooled ATI HD7750 and use that with the open source drivers. KDE compositing doesn't work @ OpenGL 3.1 at all (even though it should based on the driver's specs) and with compositing enabled accelerated video crashes my Xorg so I had to start using Openbox but at least the screen doesn't freeze for 5 seconds at a time all the time.

Really disappointed with Intel, the drivers were extremely solid in the past.

[forktheif]

The open source drivers for my ATI card are pretty good. Performance isn't spectacular but it's acceptable, and I've not run into any serious bugs for years, and I have no trouble changing resolution at all.

[velodrome]

The performance is acceptable. The problem is I have a weird flickering issue when I run Steam on a multi-monitor setup. The fix is to run a command like this:

xrandr --output DFP6 --auto --left-of DFP7 --output DFP6 --scale 1.0001x1.0001

I only had this issue with AMD (not Nvidia).

[moomin]

You're lucky. I get the choice of Steam or a laptop that can sleep. (nVidia)

In many ways it's a good thing, I get more code dOne this way.

[Maakuth]

Is there any kind of hardware acceleration for 3D graphics? If no, then those drivers are pretty much useless for gaming.

[forktheif]

Yes, there's hardware acceleration. For games like TF2 I never dip below 45fps and I'm usually up around 75fps

TF2 isn't exactly a new game, but neither is my graphics card.

[codygman]

There is hardware acceleration for the open source fglrx (radeon) drivers, nouveau (oss for nvidia), and closed source nvidia drivers.

[velodrome]

For me, the open source radeon drivers do not work at all. I am on an AMD 7790 on Ubuntu 13.10. Is the hardware not supported yet?

Is the AMD open source driver better than the closed source one?

[wtallis]

Support for the Radeon 7000 series in the open source driver arrived pretty slow. You should check to see what version of the driver is included with your distribution, as it could easily predate the 3d acceleration support.

For older hardware, the open source driver is getting competitive in terms of performance, and of course has the usual benefits of open source drivers.