Board Thread:ROBLOX help and discussion/@comment-31465706-20170307174135/@comment-24285282-20170524072550

The past 2 years have seen massive improvement in the open source drivers. Intel, nVidia and AMD have begun fully cooperating with the Open Source mesa team.

Intel is ONLY using the open source drivers on their newer chips.

AMD is dedidating a larger team to the open source driver than their proprietary one at this point, and the open source driver is now running par to each other on both features and performance for OpenGL with the Proprietary one, and the Open Source driver has better power saving. Both now use roughly the same interface for accessing the graphics card, although the Proprietary driver comes with an, albeit unnecessary, up to date patched driver module to insure proper support of the latest cards on older kernels. (Instead of just having users update the kernel.)

There are a few cevats to Linux drivers, many of which affect some very specific programs.

Mesa has some well documented behaviors that can be an issue with some systems. For instance, it will return null instead of allocating an unnecessary bank of unspecified size in certain operations. This makes some routines designed to check for video memory writability fail when using expected behavior instead of OpenGL standard behavior.

Mesa does not currently support compatability extensions in OpenGL versions newer than 3.0. There is patch in the GIT tree to change this with performance and compatability cevates to programs explicitly requesting a compatability context in OpenGL versions up to OpenGL 3.2. The particularly largest cevat is the reduced performance on compatability shaders. However, there is also the inability for compatability shaders and newer shader types to access each other. (This is compliant with the OpenGL standard, but not necessarily expected behavior.)

Other common Linux issues include:

Occasionally you run into users running the old AMD FGLRX Proprietary driver. Tell them to upgrade their entire distro. If FGLRX will install properly, their distro is dangerously out of date. Mesa has better performance and features on all AMD GPUs up to and including the "Southern Islands" GCN 1.x archetecture.

There are some occational minor library issues with nVidia drivers on certain installations. I have not heard of any lately, but I am sure they likely still exist for some users of older nVidia chips.

There are occasional issues of someone running a very old version of Linux and not knowing how to upgrade.

There are occasionally issues with someone running a non-standard setup on a highly configurable distro such as Gentoo or Arch. (No systemd setups, no dbus setup, no pulseaudio at all setups, tiling window managers lacking dialog handling.)  XKCD and other geek comics often make jokes about these setups but it's a real pain when someone demands support for their very non-standard setup, when they could easily install a compatability stack. Flatpack, docker, snappy and other formats will address many of these issues quite well, though.