ATI Radeon vs nVidia 3D accelleration

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Thursday 11 February 2010 14:21:51 Don Quixote de la Mancha wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 5:42 AM, Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ah that is why my work box has such a high framerate - the
> closed-source nVidia driver can use undocumented features that have
> not yet been reversed-engineered for Open Source use.

Well, practically all (important) features of nVidia cards are undocumented. 
That's why nouveau people have to RE it basically from scratch. That said, I 
have a feeling that RE is going quite well, they even have some working 3D 
acceleration already. Of course, it is still too early to compare it to the 
closed source driver.
 
> When I try "glxinfo | less" on my nVidia work box, it lists a whole
> slew of GLX extensions.  Even if my Radeon has 3D turned on, it
> probably doesn't support as many such extensions as the proprietary
> nVidia driver does.

That depends both on the capabilities of the hardware, and on the 
implementation of those capabilities in the radeon(hd) driver.
 
> The installation instructions says that Fedora has a
> phoronix-test-suite package, if you want to try it out yourself:
> 
>    http://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/documentation/2.4/install.html

And yum search says that there is a phoronix-test-suite package in the main 
Fedora repo (this is F12, but I guess it exists for F11 too). I'll try it out 
some day, it would be interesting... :-)

Best, :-)
Marko