Ex windows user here. I really like my Linux installation, but I don’t know where the drivers are at, or if I should worry about it.

It feels great to have one less thing to worry about (I use an AMD GPU), but GPU drivers in Windows seem to have their own release cycle, fixing game compatibility and bugs, while in Linux it also feels like we have to wait for a next kernel release to get that fix.

Or maybe it’s mesa? I don’t really understand that.

TL;DR: where are the open source drivers at? Mesa or the kernel? And also, is the release cycle the same or close to Windows counterpart? Or it just doesn’t matter?

  • EccTM
    1•1 year ago

    I personally use an Nvidia card, so someone more knowledgeable can correct me.

    For the open source drivers, Its a combination of both an AMDGPU (newer cards) or ATI (older cards) kernel module, alongside the mesa package, which provides 3D acceleration and OpenGL support. There is a separate package for Vulkan support too, either vulkan-radeon or amdvlk. For hardware video decoding, there is libva-mesa for VA-API, and mesa-vdpau for VDPAU support.

    So yeah, Windows has one monolithic drivers .exe, and Linux has it all split out into separate chunks. How quickly you get updates depends on your choice of linux distro.

    • @PerrobocOP
      1•1 year ago

      Thanks! I think this pretty much answers my question. I installed all those packages but wasn’t sure why they all weren’t in one package.