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Comment by metaobject | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a big gamer, but i recall in the late 90s - early 2000s timeframe there were several big-title FPS games available on Linux (Quake series, Unreal, Half Life). Whatever happened to that momentum? Not enough demand, I guess?

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The biggest thing was the continual (and continuing) shit show that is graphics drivers on linux.

That's just false. Graphics drivers on Linux are easy to update and offer nearly identical performance in many games.

Yeah, right.

Historically, drivers were often not available at all, at least not ones that actually exposed the real power of the hardware - and performance is usually lower.

See this set of recent benchmarks for instance, which show Linux performance lagging behind W10 by 15-25%.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=radeon-w...

These days, the performance diff is mostly from relatively low effort ports. I'm not really complaining about them - they have to earn money. But in most cases it's not primarily a drivers problem anymore.

Yeah, just stop your X server and run this opaque binary, answer these questions about kernel modules, restart X, and hope your display config isn't completely messed up... super easy!

//slightly salty

Unless you buy Intel or AMD.

Up until very recently I was on Catalyst drivers on Mint 18 and it was just as bad. Thank God the open source drivers work decent now.

And Intel? HA! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA

One word: gma500 ... welcome to hell!

Yes, I'm talking about the state of software now and hardware up to about five years old. gma500 is from about 2008, apparently.

Except that Intel still doesn't make a graphics chip worth anything when it comes to running 3D games like Fortnight. And AMD opensource drivers are far from having nVidia-like feature and capabilitiy parity with their Windwos counterparts. Sadly.

What is missing from AMD's drivers? They are great now IME, I'm using them to play games. (Note I have older GCN hardware - there seem to be more bugs with more recent hardware where they are still making bigger changes)

> What is missing from AMD's drivers?

OpenGL performance. NVidia tends to be far more performant than AMD on OpenGL games.

AMD has put more work into Vulkan, but a lot of games on Linux are still on OpenGL. See the CEMU community for details: https://www.reddit.com/r/cemu/comments/7nehtz/cemu_1113_amd_...

For a while my employer was buying motherboards with a graphics chip that requires gma500 drivers. Forget which but it was an Atom platform of somewhat recent vintage. gma500 ain't dead yet, sadly

Debian does a good job of repackaging nvidia blob to itself's non-free repo to achieve painless install process.

Cool, this is good to know! Should be easy to get it hooked up in Mint.

Note: helper packages (i.e. installer cleanup and kernel mod builder) are in both contrib and main repos, so I highly recommend setting up APT-preferences.

I do machine learning for a living.

I don't dare update my display drivers unless I have 3 days without a deliverable because of the disaster it usually is.

Usually (yes, more than 50% of the times) it will break my displays (fail to detect both monitors, switch to some weird resolution etc), and always it will break CUDA/CUDNN so I have hours of work making that work again.

I have a completely standard setup: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, NVidia GPU, Intel CPU.

(I've been using Linux since Slackware 0.9, so yes I do know how to configure things. I'm sick of it not getting better since then).

If it makes you feel any better I don’t update my windows display drivers unless ive 3 days free either, for exactly the same reason...

I don't update my drivers at all unless I run into something that refuses to work, don't fix it if it ain't broke

I work in games, so I have to keep relatively up to date.. I’m usually one - two versions behind...

I suggest you switch to btrfs and use volume snapshots. That way you can take a snapshot just before you do a major upgrade (like a driver update) and if things don't work out you can instantly restore your system so you can keep working.

Not sure what you mean. Video drivers on Linux are finally coming together for all the main players. Nvidia's proprietary drivers are still good, Radeon's free drivers are very competitive and Intel free drivers are still great (though suck for gaming).

Games got significantly more complex, relying on more abstraction layers. DirectX got significantly more popular. Console gaming exploded.

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