Re: Coordinating work around newer upstream Nvidia drivers for users
Hi All, My name is Edwin and I am the head of production at Feral Interactive. We are the Mac development and publishing company responsible for Shadow of Mordor and other AAA games on Linux. I spoke with Jorge on reddit and he suggested I post in this mailing list with some thoughts. Firstly the addition of an easier way of updating drivers is very welcome, so thanks for doing this. I think it should really help our users update without worrying about upgrading issues. With games like Shadow Of Mordor and others we have in development right now we're pushing the latest OpenGL features to the limit. This means we are hitting driver and performance issues that you might not see when using the desktop or older simpler games that only use OpenGL3.x. For example if you play Mordor on Nvidia using the default (closed source) drivers on Ubuntu the game runs in "Smurf mode" due to a driver bug, the performance is also lower than later drivers. We usually attempt to support all three graphics card vendors if possible (AMD, Nvidia and Intel) so having a good selection of drivers for all three vendors would be very advantageous. We can help by providing you with driver versions that upcoming games will be needing before they launch so the drivers are listed in time for the games launch day. We try to always try and avoid recommending the very latest drivers unless they are completely required due to driver bugs. The reasoning is the very latest drivers might have issues that have not been uncovered so being able to recommend drivers that are a few months old increases the probability they work well with the OS and other products not just our game(s). Adding the latest drivers when they are released so people can try them out if they want would be useful for users as we have found sometimes a brand new driver update can add extra performance especially shortly after a new card has been supported for the first time. Below are the drivers we recommend users to install for Mordor and also the Intel driver version we plan on recommending for the next Intel supported title we have in development. Nvidia 352.21 or later Intel 10.5.2 - http://www.mesa3d.org/relnotes/10.5.2.html (default driver for 15.04) AMD Catalyst 15.7 - http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/AMDCatalyst15-7LINReleaseNotes.aspx If I can add anything to the conversation at this stage or help out please let me know. Best Regards, Edwin -- Edwin Smith Feral Interactive Limited 64 Kimber Road London, SW18 4PP England tel: 44-(0)208-875-1375 fax: 44-(0)208-875-1846 www.feral.co.uk Make Your Play -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Coordinating work around newer upstream Nvidia drivers for users
On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 2:12 PM, Michael Larabel wrote: > Is there any thought to also making "more official" along similar lines any > of the open-source driver PPAs? Namely like the Oibaf PPA that ships latest > Mesa and X components? Any improvements and support there would be helpful > to users of Intel and Radeon graphics now that Mesa is achieving OpenGL 4 > compliance and will soon be able to run more Steam games with decent > performance for Radeon/Intel. Hi Michael, I am unfamiliar with most of the AMD stuff, and I'm hoping someone more knowledgeable will comment on it. As you can see we kept PPA name vendor-unspecific so if someone wants to step up maybe that can happen? > If there's enough interest and once monitoring how well the existing PPAs > (or if there's a new centralized/official PPA) are evolving I can set it up > to trial on a few modern NVIDIA systems to see if it's worthwhile. I think that's very generous of you to offer this and I think it'd be worth setting it up. Real performance data over time will end up being invaluable. -- Jorge Castro Canonical Ltd. http://juju.ubuntu.com/ - Automate your Cloud Infrastructure -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Coordinating work around newer upstream Nvidia drivers for users
I have been using oibaf ppa for long and with good results and stability but for LTS, it only supports LTS 14.04.1 and not the later. Also AMD Catalyst PPA is dicey due to AMD's not supporting latest xorg but can be done for LTS and it would be an excellent idea. Regards Arup Arup Roy Chowdhury On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 11:42 PM, Michael Larabel < michael.lara...@phoronix.com> wrote: > Hi Jorge, > > This indeed would be a good move to make it easier for Ubuntu gamers to > easily have access to the latest drivers. The newest NVIDIA drivers bring > some improvements for the higher profile Linux game ports while having the > latest AMD Catalyst Linux driver tends to always be critical for gamers. > > Is there any thought to also making "more official" along similar lines > any of the open-source driver PPAs? Namely like the Oibaf PPA that ships > latest Mesa and X components? Any improvements and support there would be > helpful to users of Intel and Radeon graphics now that Mesa is achieving > OpenGL 4 compliance and will soon be able to run more Steam games with > decent performance for Radeon/Intel. > > If help is needed with testing, I can easily have a number of systems > within my automated test farm do automated tests of new driver packages. > > http://linuxbenchmarking.com/?latest-open-source-linux-graphics - this is > one of the "trackers" I run right now on Ubuntu systems on a > fully-automated via Phoronix-Test-Suite + Phoromatic.com, daily basis of > using the latest Oibaf PPA packages + Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA for > tracking the performance of the latest Git kernel/Mesa code on different > Intel/Radeon hardware. It could be useful seeing if a particular driver > push into any new PPA directly benefits performance or at least seeing if > any games fail to run on a particular build. > > I'd imagine that the PPA wouldn't see updates daily so Phoromatic already > supports running on a triggered-basis, a.k.a. automatically whenever it > sees there are new packages available to apt-get. Then the results could > automatically go out on a new tracker under LinuxBenchmarking.com or > wherever. > > If there's enough interest and once monitoring how well the existing PPAs > (or if there's a new centralized/official PPA) are evolving I can set it up > to trial on a few modern NVIDIA systems to see if it's worthwhile. > > Cheers, > Michael > > -- > ubuntu-desktop mailing list > ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop > -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
Re: Coordinating work around newer upstream Nvidia drivers for users
Hi Jorge, This indeed would be a good move to make it easier for Ubuntu gamers to easily have access to the latest drivers. The newest NVIDIA drivers bring some improvements for the higher profile Linux game ports while having the latest AMD Catalyst Linux driver tends to always be critical for gamers. Is there any thought to also making "more official" along similar lines any of the open-source driver PPAs? Namely like the Oibaf PPA that ships latest Mesa and X components? Any improvements and support there would be helpful to users of Intel and Radeon graphics now that Mesa is achieving OpenGL 4 compliance and will soon be able to run more Steam games with decent performance for Radeon/Intel. If help is needed with testing, I can easily have a number of systems within my automated test farm do automated tests of new driver packages. http://linuxbenchmarking.com/?latest-open-source-linux-graphics - this is one of the "trackers" I run right now on Ubuntu systems on a fully-automated via Phoronix-Test-Suite + Phoromatic.com, daily basis of using the latest Oibaf PPA packages + Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA for tracking the performance of the latest Git kernel/Mesa code on different Intel/Radeon hardware. It could be useful seeing if a particular driver push into any new PPA directly benefits performance or at least seeing if any games fail to run on a particular build. I'd imagine that the PPA wouldn't see updates daily so Phoromatic already supports running on a triggered-basis, a.k.a. automatically whenever it sees there are new packages available to apt-get. Then the results could automatically go out on a new tracker under LinuxBenchmarking.com or wherever. If there's enough interest and once monitoring how well the existing PPAs (or if there's a new centralized/official PPA) are evolving I can set it up to trial on a few modern NVIDIA systems to see if it's worthwhile. Cheers, Michael -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
