NVIDIA Extends Olive Branch to Linux Gamers with Performance Doubling Driver Update

Linus' outburst occurred in June, while the press release for this states that NVIDIA had been working with Valve for about a year. It seems that NVIDIA's support wasn't quite as lacking as some people believed. I've been an NVIDIA user under Linux for what must be a decade by this point, and I've always been pretty pleased with what I've been given. Can't say the same about AMD, but things there have gotten a lot better as well.

Also, I really wish they'd stop benchmarking Left for Dead 2. They have Serious Sam 3 for Linux... benchmark that, not a game that could run on 10-yo PCs without any trouble.

Well, just to be clear, Linus was speaking about the lack of Optimus support and lack of open specs for the hardware, in June. At least one person at nVidia has been working on Optimus support since then, but Linus was and is still absolutely correct about the historical state of their support.

On the topic of benchmarks: Serious Sam 3 doesn't use the Source engine, so it would be hard for Valve to use that to gauge the improvements in Source.

"Performance doubling driver"?

How about 'less-crippled driver that is still only 50% as fast as the PC driver".

>> How about 'less-crippled driver that is still only 50% as fast as the PC driver"

How about you quit making things up?

And that's with the old :"slow" 304 drivers on Linux. The nVidia drivers typically run as fast, if not faster on Linux when configured correctly. My guess is that the new drivers automatically unredirect fullscreen windows and the other default Compiz settings meant to make things play nicely with other drivers for old POS cards.

The nVidia drivers use the same codebase on both platforms, so there's no intrinsic speed difference in the driver itself.  The same OpenGL app will commonly run faster on Linux due to better memory management and kernel design.

Any improvement in the possibility of Linux gaming gaining real traction is good news.

I'd love to use Linux for more games.

Yes, the Optimus point is one that a large number of people seem to gloss over, and as for SS3, I know, but still. Source games are just horrible for benchmarking.