By dissipating energy and generating mixing, internal tides (ITs) play a major role in the climatological evolution of the ocean. Our understanding of this class of ocean variability is however hindered by the rarity of observations capable of capturing ITs with global coverage. The data provided by the Global Drifter Program (GDP) offer high temporal resolution and quasi-global coverage, thus bringing promising perspectives. However, due to their inherent drifting nature, these instruments provide a distorted view of the IT signal. By theoretically rationalizing this distortion and leveraging a massive synthetic drifter numerical simulation, we are able to map semi-diurnal IT energy levels from GDP data and compare it to three datasets (two numerical simulations, and a satellite altimetry IT atlas). We find that all numerical simulations exhibit biases. Nonetheless, the simulation that benefited from dedicated attention towards ITs representation performs best. This supports renewed efforts in the concurrent numerical modeling of ITs / ocean circulation. The substantial deficit of energy in the IT atlas highlights the inability for altimetric estimates to measure incoherent and finer scale ITs and strongly supports the need to isolate ITs signature in the data collected by the new wide-swath altimetry mission SWOT.