[Phoronix] Ubuntu 9.04 vs. Fedora 11 Performance

[Gilboa Davara]

On Sat, 2009-06-13 at 05:43 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Gilboa Davara wrote:
> > Might I remind everyone here that Phoronix was the first to offer a
> > comprehensive benchmark suite to the OSS world.
> 
> On the other hand, they actively hurt Free Software by continuously
> providing free advertising for the latest and "greatest" graphics hardware
> with only proprietary drivers (at least for OpenGL), of course benchmarked
> with the proprietary drivers and touting their features, while focusing
> very little on Free drivers. There's the occasional article about Free
> drivers, but even those are sometimes mixed articles like "news from ATI"
> where it talks partly about the Free drivers and partly about
> fglrx/Catalyst, and they regularly contain statements like "While there has
> been a lot of great news this week surrounding the open-source ATI graphics
> stack on Linux, there is still a fair amount of work left and this work is
> not immediately the miracle driver for ATI Radeon customers." which promote
> proprietary driver use. And most importantly, there are also few to no
> benchmarks with Free drivers. I'd really like comparative benchmarks of
> graphics cards using exclusively Free drivers so I can choose the fastest
> of those. (I only know of one site doing such a benchmark and they use
> glxgears as their "benchmark", so I don't trust their results at all.)

Sorry.
But you are dead wrong.

I subscribed to Phoronix' RSS feed and at least 1/3-1/2 of their news
stories are on OSS driver (mostly Intel and ATI) driver development -
far more than any other OSS new site. [1]

However, the sad truth is that -currently- neither xorg-drv-intel nor
xorg-x11-drv-ati / xorg-x11-drv-radeonhd are capable of generating
competitive 3D performance (Especially the recent GEM'ed versions of
xorg-drv-intel) and far less mature than, say, nvidia.ko.

Asking Phoronix not to report this and/or skew the benchmarks simply
because the results are politically inconvenient to us is, in my view,
simply unacceptable.

Having said all that, I doubt that Phoronix stand concerning binary
drives is related to their Apache results...

> > and no, glxgears is not a benchmark!
> 
> Indeed, glxgears really sucks as as a benchmark, Phoronix's benchmark suite
> (as imperfect as it is) is definitely more useful.

Oh, there's a start :)

- Gilboa
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%
3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=95j&q=site%3Awww.phoronix.com+%28%2BIntel+AND+%
2BGEM%29+OR+%2Bradeonhd+OR+%2Bxorg-drv-ati should generate >4000 hits.