There's a discussion currently on the rage3d.com linux forum as to whether or not the DRI is good enough for 3D gaming. One particular individual has claimed that the reason why the FireGL drivers (which use the DRI) have worse performance than the nVidia drivrs are because the FireGL drivers use the DRI. He argues that since the DRI 3D drivers implement as much of the 3D pipeline as possible in userspace, and the nVidia driver presumably implements more in kernel space (due to their 2 MB kernel module size), the DRI has a lot more expensive context switches.
I know very little about video driver programming, so I'm curious if anyone who can is willing to comment and possibly refute his claims?
I would bet that the Nvidia kernel module is so large because they support every Nvidia card made since the original Riva TNT. That's *7* generations of cards in one kernel module (TNT, TNT2, Geforce, Geforce2, GF3, GF4, and GeforceFX). There kernel module also contains their own AGPGART driver that supports at least 3 or 4 different chipsets. Given that, 2MB doesn't seem so big. :)
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