"As of yet I don't have a clear picture what this new driver will look like once evolved besides hearing 'boxes, many fucking boxes mate', when being told about the increased abstractions of the multi-OS-focused driver design."

If only more discussions about software architecture were that honest.

I hope they'll unify the codebase with OSX's driver too. Intel graphics drivers on Mac are way behind their Windows (and even Linux?) counterparts in performance and OpenGL featureset.

Not too sure about the proprietary binaries on Linux but rendering the same thing on Mac and then on bootcamp Windows is really night and day. I have a friend who plays Counter-Strike: GO on his Macbook Pro and it's unbelievable how much better it runs on Windows. I realize that specific software was pretty much designed to run on Windows but the performance difference is drastic nonetheless.

I find that most Valve games run much better on Linux than they do in Windows. Whether any given game runs better in Linux or Windows is a coin flip, however I will grant that there are not many games that run well in Linux but are unplayable in Windows. The converse is definitely true; there are many games whose framerate drops over 50% when run in Linux. Some games even perform better running in WINE than they do using the native port, which is somewhat baffling.

Overall I'm somewhat surprised by painless gaming on Linux has become. I switched back to Linux on my personal computer after a number of years of primarily using Windows because of gaming. I thought it was going to be a pain point for me, however a few months later Steam announced the Steam Box and promoted Linux gaming heavily.

I (finally) have a beefy rig though, so perhaps Linux ports get bottle-necked more easily. I haven't measured input latency or anything that would be relevant to the competitive CS scene, but the framerate is higher on Linux than it was on my (now gone) Windows partition.

It would be nice if OS X got around to hardware accelerating Quartz too. So much of my app's time is spent in memcpy in the depths of Quartz while resizing windows.