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Is there a comparison of graphics cards that work with exclusively free software (FOSS drivers without any blobs)? If possible the comparison should include price and performance benchmarks of the graphics card when using the free graphics driver. But a plain list would be helpful too.

Or are there no graphics cards with notable performance which don't require any firmware blobs?

So far the best I could find is this. But that page neither lists such devices nor have I found a link to such a comparison there.

Is there a list-format comparison of graphics cards using exclusively FOSS that includes benchmarks?

(I'm interested in such a list because I'd like to know which FOSS graphics cards can be used to smoothly run some 3D games in emulators such as Dolphin or more.)

mYnDstrEAm
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  • "To smoothly run 3D games" can be a very high-end goal indeed if you include the latest PC games with `wine`. Dolphin seems to be a Nintendo Gamecube/Wii emulator, and it requires a GPU with DirectX11.1/OpenGL 4.4 support to work efficiently. If you plan to run other emulators, which ones? – telcoM May 19 '20 at 09:08
  • I didn't write that this would include the latest PC games. It would be interesting to see whether and how well graphics cards with FOSS drivers would run these nevertheless. Personally I'm mainly interested in 3D emulated console games for now. It would be nice if the comparison also showed whether it has D11/OG4.4 support then. It doesn't require any GPU - I can run 3D games with CPU only. And I'd like to run as many as new emulators as possible - see [Lutris](https://lutris.net/) for some examples. – mYnDstrEAm May 20 '20 at 10:07
  • (Also you have a reopen vote relating your own questions, click "reopen") – peterh May 20 '20 at 11:12

3 Answers3

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Phoronix most likely has an article comparing gpu and drivers. You might have to correlate a few articles though.

lor_louis
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  • Thanks, that's helpful. But do these graphics cards use exclusively free software? Do those AMD GPUs not require binary blobs or is this answer wrong/outdated?: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/410942/233262 – mYnDstrEAm Apr 30 '20 at 19:45
  • @mYnDstrEAm If you read the article he uses mesa for amd (which is open source) but he uses nvidia (closed source) for nvdia gpus. You will have to read more articles on the website where he tested free drivers and correlate the results yourself. – lor_louis Apr 30 '20 at 19:49
  • Ok, but still it looks like AMD graphics cards require blobs for proper functionality. Furthermore, those graphics cards are a bit too high-end for my purposes so I hoped the comparison to also include older/less-performant hardware. But I'll read some of the comparisons there. – mYnDstrEAm Apr 30 '20 at 20:14
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h-node.org has several resources related to free software, including a list of hardware that can run under completely free drivers. You may find the catalog specifically for video cards here.

John Leuenhagen
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Something else I found is this feature matrix of the nouveau driver with the graphics card models of the code names listed here.

However, I'm not sure how relevant or correct the list and matrix are as my old graphics card should be well supported but apparently has worse graphics-related performance than CPU-only.

Something similar for the radeon doesn't seem to exist and wouldn't be relevant as it still looks like AMD graphics cards require blobs for proper functionality.

Many newer nvidea cards also require firmware blobs.

Phoronix has a comparison of older graphics cards, some of which might be relevant to this question (entirely free software).

h-node can list graphics cards that work with 3D acceleration (without any benchmark info) using just free drivers per year.

For nvidea graphics cards there now is the open source driver NVIDIA Linux Open GPU Kernel Module. On its GitHub page there is a list of supported graphics cards. However, that's not a comparison that includes benchmark info and only works for cards from 2018 or newer.

mYnDstrEAm
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