AppDB: add graphic card info field?

[burp at nurfuerspam.de]

 Hi,

currently the AppDB test results include (besides the obvious wine related fields) only the distribution as distinguishing attribute for a test(er).

Now, my view point is the game(r) perspective. Maybe that's far too narrow, but still...

Many times I looked at test results and wished to see which graphic card and driver/version was used for the test for obvious reasons:
- Owners of NVidia cards with binary drivers are quite often not seeing the same set of bugs as owners of ATI cards with binary drivers
- Owners of the same card are quite often having very different results with different driver versions, and it happened multiple times that an older version was working where a newer wasn't (though the other way around is naturally more common...)

Recently this has become even worse IMO due to people trying to play games with the open source stack on ATI cards which is a completely different experience angle.


An example for the matter is Runes of Magic:

The game doesn't work on ATI cards at all, on older NVidia cards there's a workaround by disabling the GLSL shader, on newer NVidia cards it works also with GLSL shader.

Most recent test results are all silver/gold/platinum based on NVidia cards, looking at the full history there's a nice spectrum of garbage/bronze (ATI) alternating with silver/gold/platinum (NVidia).

As an average user, this tends to be quite confusing if you don't look at the details.


This is *not* just a matter of bugs, but also of features: World of Warcraft on ATI/Catalyst wasn't showing an indoor map for about 2 years (no pbuffers in ATI drivers), while the feature was fine on NVidia, while OpenGL hardware cursor is still available on neither card (missing feature of WoW's OpenGL backend).


(TLDR starts here >>)

How are the chances that a patch to include graphics chip, driver name and version into test results would be accepted?

Or would it be more welcome to split affected applications into versions by graphic card/driver? (I.e.: Runes of Magic: 2.x on ATI/Catalyst, World of Warcraft: 3.3.x on Intel/OpenSource, ...)

Cheers,

   $B1 $28

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