[Linux] AMD/ATI, NVIDIA Open-source VS Close-source discussion

[Succubi]

Hello,
I despise of making threads similar to this without giving a decent sum amount of information, but I've decided that this topic might actually be a bit of important chatter when it comes to performance and handling of certain games.

So the basic question is, has anyone done a comparison of how more demanding games run when handled between the opensource and closedsource drivers on both NVIDIA and AMD/ATI?

For starters, I run a laptop on Arch Linux with an AMD A4-4300M APU@ 2.5GHz [Radeon HD 7420G], and I've seen major stutters and issues with fullscreen on 2D/Lesser 3D games such as Persona, Yggdra Union, Disgae Series but Major Improvements on framerate and speed on games such as Monster Hunter Series (60/60 on 4x PSP size and 16x AF)

Most relevant change I can admit from jumping from open source to closer source was Disgae, which dropped from 60 FPS at the coffin scene at the start of the game to stuttery 30~40 FPS.

[Bigpet]

Well for Nvidia you can pretty much guarantee that the closed source version is a lot better. The closed source version shares most code with the Windows driver, so there's feature parity with Windows. In addition, they don't release any valuable internal specifications, so the open-source drivers need to laboriously reverse engineer pretty much everything.

For AMD, I haven't tested the drivers in a long time but a few years ago both the closed source and the open source drivers sucked.

[[Unknown]]

Pretty sure I saw the closed source drivers performed better in PPSSPP a year ago or so. Also, the open source one simply crashed when using WINE (which isn't necessary to use but has a few extra features so I was testing it.) Maybe that's fixed now...

I think someone told me once (grain of salt) that AMD/ATI had superior open source drivers.

-[Unknown]

[Succubi]

(02-02-2015 07:51 PM)[Unknown] Wrote:  Pretty sure I saw the closed source drivers performed better in PPSSPP a year ago or so. Also, the open source one simply crashed when using WINE (which isn't necessary to use but has a few extra features so I was testing it.) Maybe that's fixed now...

I think someone told me once (grain of salt) that AMD/ATI had superior open source drivers.

-[Unknown]

I presume that when dealing with 2D, the open source prevails and functions much better, and unfortunatly what I posted in the original post about FPS drop from upgrading to closed-source might have been false information, as my recalled last time of playing Disgae only resulted in crackles and to my knowledge 60 FPS in which I was indeed using closed-source, but then again I think I might have updated my AMD drivers a while after that. I think I could run some benchmarks on current, downgrade and open-source.

Would anyone know any spec-heavy games for examples for both major 3D usage and only 2D usage?
EDIT: A mix between two would be great as well.

[[Unknown]]

God of War (there is a demo available) is a good example of something that hits the GPU hard, iirc. It's 3D.

For 2D, some areas of Tales of Phantasia X (there's a demo for this also) can be pretty heavy duty too.

Not sure about a heavy mix... I mean, no 3D game uses exclusively 3D graphics drawing.

-[Unknown]