Nick on nVidia, Poor Linux Doom3 Performance Explained

Nick Triantos, director of OpenGL software (writes and supervises the writing of drivers) at nVidia gave a fast paced and high content presentation about the architecture of GPU’s and how some people and organizations are working on getting them to do things besides graphics, primarily complex scientific simulations that require lots of parallel floating point operations. It was a very interesting talk with lots of technical explanations.

After the presentation, I followed him outside the lecture hall to ask him why Doom 3 runs at 15-20 fps in linux when it goes well over 50 or 60 fps in windows (800×600, low detail). He told me that he had called up “John” (Caramack) and asked why the performance was so poor in the linux port. Caramack said that the Doom3 engine has some programmable something or other, don’t remember what it was now, that wasn’t properly implemented in the linux port. Anyway, after I had several answers from several different sources, Nick was able to tell me that the issue would be solved in a patch update to the Doom3 lin bins. Now at least I know what I’m waiting for. =)

Update: I think it was “programmable pixel shaders”..

UPDATE Nov 23: It was 2 days ago now that I tried out the latest nVidia drivers, 1.0.6629, which were apparently released earlier this month. Much to my surprise, my Doom performance jumped from like 10-20 fps to a smooth-enough 30-50 fps. This is at 800×600 high detail. I’m betting it was a combination between the newer Doom 3 linux binaries and the new nVidia drivers. I guess they figured some stuff out. Now I can play my Doom 3 in linux! Yay!