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Open graphics drivers caught up while nobody was watching

Three years ago this was a hobby with a performance penalty. The gap on common workloads is now within noise.

Open graphics drivers caught up while nobody was watching
Open graphics drivers caught up while nobody was watching — XENVORA Photograph: SEGA Dreamcast Graphic Processor (CLX2), Rawpixel (CC0) · Licence

The reversal happened incrementally, the way infrastructure usually improves: a shader compiler rewrite here, a scheduling fix there, and suddenly the benchmark charts overlap.

Where it still trails

Day-one support for a brand-new GPU generation, and a handful of vendor-specific compute extensions. If your work depends on either, the closed stack is still the answer.

For everything else — desktop compositing, browsers, video pipelines, most games — the open driver is now the safer choice because bugs get fixed in public.

The advantage of an open driver is not speed. It is that you can read the bug.

Tarek Nour
Software & Platforms
Tarek Nour

Tarek writes about developer tooling, build systems and the unglamorous work that keeps platforms alive.

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