Nvidia Drops Support For Its Open Source Driver 412
An anonymous reader writes "While Nvidia is not open-source friendly (despite public outcries over the years), they have traditionally supported the xf86-video-nv driver to provide basic mode setting support and other basic functionality. However, with the 'Fermi' and future products, even that open source support will cease to exist. Nvidia has announced they are dropping this open source support for future GPUs and really ending it altogether. Nvidia's recommendation is to just use the generic X.Org VESA driver to navigate their way to nvidia.com so that they can install the proprietary driver. Fortunately there is the Nouveau project that provides a 2D and 3D video driver for Nvidia's hardware, but Nvidia fails to acknowledge it nor support their efforts in any form."
David Gerard points out that Nouveau is going into Linux 2.6.33.
So buy intel video cards (Score:2, Insightful)
How is this a surprise?
This is about as newsworthy as mono being a patent minefield and a bad idea.
Re:So buy intel video cards (Score:5, Insightful)
buy intel video cards
Oh? Where can I buy offboard Intel video cards?
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I don't think you can. Sorry I was not 100 clear. I meant buy intel graphics hardware.
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Technically, you can.
The performance will make even the worst integrated graphics that you can buy nowadays look significantly better, but you can get Intel graphics on a Core i7. Or anything with a PCI slot, really.
It's called the i740.
I believe it'll work with the drivers for Intel integrated graphics, as the i740 is the direct predecessor of Intel's integrated graphics line, and IIRC, the i740 is actually the same as the i810's graphics hardware.
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This is incorrect. I own an i740 graphics adapter and, unfortunately, it is unsupported:
http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Intel [freedesktop.org]
There's a driver for the card, but it's 2D only, and hasn't been improved in any way for the last 10 years or so. Of course, the card 3D performance is so weak that software acceleration on a modern CPU would probably be faster, however I was hugely disappointed when I wanted to get some 3D acceleration on one of my old Pentium 2 PC. And if you want a cheap card with no 3D or unusable
Re:So buy intel video cards (Score:5, Funny)
Or that any graphics intensive games will work with.
Games... right... wasn't this a Linux discussion? Games threads belong in discussions attached to Mac stories!
Re:So buy intel video cards (Score:4, Informative)
I bought a Matrox. I think it was a Parhelia. Can't quite recall.
I had heard "buy Matrox" all along since around 95 when I first started with linux. well long story short: it's an urban legend. To be sure, the 2D on those cards are just awesome! Sucks for 3D but the 2D is just gorgeous.
However, their support for linux is just plain shoddy. At the time I was using the card, their driver wouldn't work for that particular model. someone was providing some patches to get the thing to work. but just barely. I wish they supported it better. I would love to use that card - I don't have much use for 3D. But I simply can't. Using nvidia now since it came with this computer. but would love to use Matrox. just can't.
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It's not just CAD work either. With Compiz 3d acceleration speed matters in regular desktop. Also, modern Nvidia graphics cards allow the majority of video codec rendering to be offloaded onto the video card's processor. Personally, prior to adopting a modern Nvidia card for my Linux system, ALL video had tearing and other problems. Not major, but noticeable next to a Mac or Windows. On a new Nvidia with VDAPI enabled, my playback is fine.
The old "Go Matrox if you just want to use desktop stuff!" becam
Re:So buy intel video cards (Score:5, Insightful)
Try playing Quake 4 on an Intel Video card. Let us know how you get on.
Re:So buy intel video cards (Score:5, Funny)
It looks as good as on an ATI/Nvidia card so far...
Hang on.. frame 2 is coming up.. yup still looks good.
Re:So buy intel video cards (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you might as well use the closed source driver. This does not change their position on that.
Re:So buy intel video cards (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:So buy intel video cards (Score:4, Funny)
IANAL, but the Mono business has been cleared up (unless there are non-Microsoft patents lurking somewhere).
A legally-binding decision not to sue is a legally binding decision not to sue. No respectable judge would even agree to hear the case unless you decided to rip off some bit of code that Microsoft didn't release.
Mono is safe. Stop spreading this BS.
Re:So buy intel video cards (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft has a history of trying to sell Linux-relevant patents to trolls and of using third-party proxies to attack Linux.
Microsoft has not changed its hostility towards Linux or open formats. Mono MAY be safe, but don't use it for infrastructure projects. Don't encourage the use of Microsoft-sponsored formats or protocols.
Mono is best used as a solely Windows compatibility tool.
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I did, and all I got was paper thrown at me. On the paper it was noted that microsoft has been cutting back a lot and they only have paper for chairs so he threw a piece of his at me.
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Because almost always, the 3D stuff comes along for the ride, when you get a couple dual-link DVI ports strapped to it.
(And, sometimes, 2D stuff can lay on the 3D acceleration hardware.)
Even ATI's current server 2D discrete graphics chipset, the ES1000, is basically just a die-shrunk version of the Radeon 7000, which was a solid low-end PCI/AGP 3D graphics card when it came out.
Huh? (Score:2)
What does that mean? Is the "X.Org VESA driver" now a web browser?
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No, they mean you should use the VESA driver so you can fire up a GUI browser and go to their website.
I sure hope you are being purposely obtuse.
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Television Advertisement: "So use your computer to go to [PRODUCT WEBSITE] today!"
msauve: "What does this mean? Is my "computer" now a web browser?"
PROTIP: Substituting idiocy for pedantry doesn't make you look cool. Not even on slashdot.
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Television Advertisement: "So use your computer to go to [PRODUCT WEBSITE] today!"
msauve: "What does this mean? Is my "computer" now a web browser?"
PROTIP: Substituting idiocy for pedantry doesn't make you look cool. Not even on slashdot.
It will be if you are going to run Chrome.
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Only if it is installed as part of EMACS.....
Bad move.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bad move.... (Score:5, Informative)
They are not discontinuing support for their proprietary driver, just their open source driver, which has always been crap. If you want good 3d performance you can still use (and always should have been using) their proprietary driver.
I know, I know. You were just making a crack about how nobody uses linux...
Re:Bad move.... (Score:5, Informative)
The ATI drivers are coming right along and the intel ones are pretty darn good these days.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Bad move.... (Score:4, Insightful)
AMD has been providing documentation and sponsoring the free radeonhd drivers. Of course, they can't simply open fglrx - it probably has plenty of third-party code. But it's a nice move.
And why would we be obliged to buy cards from companies who don't provide open source drivers? Personally, I reserve my right to only buy cards with OSS driver support.
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What does this have to do with them stopping development on an open source driver?
They will still provide their closed source driver which is better for a "high-end gaming environment" anyway (as long as you have no issues with your entire system not being 100% free/beer/etc).
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And not 100% stable. And 0% able to hibernate. And being unable to build OpenGL software without jumping through hoops because their driver moves aside mesa libraries while failing to properly set up the replacement.
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Re:Bad move.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nvidia is so far the only company that managed to provide a high-quality proprietary Linux driver for their hardware.
Others either provide high-quality open source drivers (ex: Intel) or crappy proprietary drivers (AMD/ATI).
So dozens or not, Nvidia is doing fine as far as Linux-using gamers are concerned. Developers, on the other hand, could use a less hostile stance on documentation and vendor support of open drivers.
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To be fair ATI makes crap drivers for all platforms, not just linux.
Re:Bad move.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Just to make this anecdote war complete: I used to have an nvidia 285-based card. Ran perfectly, stable, no issues. Eventually, it passes it's used by date, and releases the magic smoke (case was on the hot side)
I replaced it with an ati card: a HIS 5970, high end video card:
Framerate issues in l4d2 after a level change
Frequent hangs/crashes of the video system
Drivers that blue screen the system during installation
Drivers that can't upgrade to the next version without a full uninstall, boot to safe mode, and wipe using a driver cleaner
Horrible flickering in GTA4 when shadows are turned on.
And to cap it all off, the performance with a built-in-sli card is WORSE than the old 285 i used to have!
(yeah, okay, it's windows for both, but the exact same system was 100% stable with one, and not with the other, the only difference being the card and the drivers.)
I see your anecdote, and raise you one "surprise, both sides have issues, that's not what this story is about"
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Yes, because one should reinstall their OS every time they put in a new graphics card.
Re:Bad move.... (Score:4, Interesting)
A pair of 4870's.
I've had over a year of random boots, continually booting system until it warms up (I guess), and driver issues.
One of the biggest problems with the drivers is that if you don't eradicate every bit from your system (I use a driver sweeper and registry cleaner), upgrades are very erratic. It took 10 months or so of upgrading, uninstalling and installing upgrades until I chased down the two tools and fully cleaned my system before applying the newest drivers. I still had problems but they were much reduced. With the latest clean up and drivers, the 512M card seems to have stabilized
The 1 gig card still caused problems until I finally (after several months of posting errors to my trouble ticket at Diamond) got the ok to return it. Since its return, it hasn't had a single problem (it's been a week). Keeping my fingers crossed.
And there, I've provided one in return.
[John]
Re:Bad move.... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, AMD has released many programming specifications and sponsors the Free radeonhd drivers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_hardware_and_FOSS#ATI.2FAMD [wikipedia.org]
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Exactly. NVidia users should really get out of their heads the notion that, if a company offers propietary drivers, they *must* be superior to the open-source ones in some shape or form.
Sometimes, companies do stupid things like sending a terrible piece of software to compete with a superior one that's available with far less strings attached, and that they support as well, just because they can. AMD is one of those companies.
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Re:Bad move.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I know at least 200 CGI artists whose IT department would love to switch to Linux and use economically affordable but quite powerful NVidia cards, and a desktop vendor who lost the sale because they couldn't legally pre-install the NVidia drivers nor rely on the NVidia setups to remain stable. The NVidia installer moves aside OpenGL libraries and replaces them: any software updates that accidentally include fresh OpenGL libraries break the NVidia setup.
They're testing ATI based video cards right now to try and close the deal.
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Be sure to vote with your wallet (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Be sure to vote with your wallet (Score:5, Insightful)
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They don't have to support an open source driver. If they would just publish specs the community could take care of implementing them. This used to be the norm before VESA came along and created a common API and then the market fractured again with 3D.
Why is it so important to have these advanced drivers in the kernel anyway? A framebuffer console only needs 2D and that can be handled with proper VESA support. If something more powerful is needed the kernel should provide hooks to allow userland to switch t
Re:Be sure to vote with your wallet (Score:5, Interesting)
They don't have to support an open source driver. If they would just publish specs the community could take care of implementing them.
1) You assume that there's a ready set of PDFs that could be uploaded somewhere. There's not, there's actually a mess of various documentation mixed in with tons of internal notes, foreign IP, trade secrets and stuff that was fixed in the driver and commented there but isn't really in a separate document at all. AMD has put a helluva lot of effort in creating a process to produce the documentation and get formal signoff from lawyers, technical experts and executives that this information is safe to release. Often they've given up on documentation and found it's easier to produce a clean code snippet and get that through the review - it's far from a trivial process.
2) Since it's normally a one-to-one hardware-driver combination, things get redone. A lot. Many things are simply removed and replaced by software, kind of like winmodems. It's not like you build a OpenGL 2.0 driver and next generation you have a working 2.0 driver on 3.0 hardware, you have to keep up with the changes to get any hardware support at all. It wouldn't be entirely impossible to do it from specs alone, but it would be difficult. In practice you need people in the project or available to the project to answer questions, correct documentation and work with the internal driver/hardware team. And/or possibly have some sort of NDA program in addition to the public specs, but all of this takes time and effort which equals money.
3) The community is quite frankly not that big. At last headcount there was about a dozen working on the AMD source drivers, of which three are AMD employees. I've heard Bridgman say they use 2-3% of the effort on Linux despite accounting for 1% of the sales, so a back-of-the-napkin calculation says the internal driver team is something like 100 people. With complete access to all the documentation including on unreleased products, the hardware designers, hardware simulators, early engineering samples and so on. So on top of all their other disadvantages, the community is vastly outnumbered. Not to dispute that they could do a lot more specs than without, just that there's a lot more missing than specs.
Re:Be sure to vote with your wallet (Score:4, Interesting)
I've heard Bridgman say they use 2-3% of the effort on Linux despite accounting for 1% of the sales
If documentation disclosure had been baked in from the beginning, they might have been able to keep their IP from becoming so difficult to untangle. Perhaps moving forward they are taking this better into account. If so the burden should already be on a downward trajectory.
Plus they have nVidia's recent decision to thank for potentially shifting another 0.5% their way.
While they're at it, they might wish to adopt a living documentation model internally, so that bugs fixed in the code base are directly reflected in the primary documentation. How is that an insurmountable process challenge to a group of 100 smart people coding device drivers for billion transistor chips of mind boggling complexity?
Re:Be sure to vote with your wallet (Score:5, Insightful)
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NVidia is also voting with their wallet. They seem to feel that they're not getting enough in additional sales to cover the cost of supporting the open source driver.
Why is it cheaper to support a proprietary driver where you have to do all the development yourself, then to help developing an open-source driver?
Re:Be sure to vote with your wallet (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it cheaper to support a proprietary driver where you have to do all the development yourself, then to help developing an open-source driver?
You can't pick and choose developers in an open source project. And it will be very expensive to support people who may be not qualified for the job. You can't expect everyone to be familiar with hardware, or with driver coding, or with industry-standard methods. If you do the programming in-house you, as a manager, simply give the job to people who know how to do it right, and it gets done right.
There is also that cathedral vs. bazaar problem. You, as a manager or as an experienced programmer, may know how certain things need to be done. Perhaps this is not your first project of this type. In the cathedral you simply issue directives how to do it, and it gets done exactly to your requirements (if not, they fix it until you like it.) In the bazaar you only can voice your opinion, and everyone else is free to ignore it. As result, if bazaar members are not as competent with this particular problem as you are, you may watch them making the same mistakes that you did 10 years ago. Meanwhile the software suffers, and your company's hardware is unfairly blamed for that. If the company supports the open-source model then it will be also said that "Company N is unable to make the feature X work, even though they allocated their best engineers to help the developers." Bad news. If you want something done right, do it yourself.
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Probably litigation costs due to patented stuff they use inside their products. It's probably easier and cheaper to have a few people developing their closed source stuff instead.
But don't ask me, I am just a simple Linux user...
Re:Be sure to vote with your wallet (Score:5, Informative)
Let's not forget that nVidia sued, then purchased at a discount, then killed 3Dfx, the first company to create a fully Open Source stack for 3D hardware. You can still find their "Glide" stack, there's a Debian package for it, but the hardware isn't produced any longer.
Intel and ATI find this a worthwhile market, especially because the technical workstation market is insisting on Linux and supportable (meaning Open Source) full-performance drivers for all hardware. Gamers are a useful market but not the only market that 3D vendors play to these days.
If you asked me what was the reason for this, I'd guess it was collusion.
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Penny wise Pound foolish.
Do you use what works best today, fully knowing that it will limit your options in the future, or use something less functional that will be better long term?
Freedom, is not as you have pointed out, an absolute good, but when freedom aligns with the common good, only fools go against it.
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Saying that on Slashdot is sort of like walking into the wrong party. :-) I do open my TV to fix it, and I would suppose a lot of folks here do.
Yes, if you figure you can always do what the boxes you buy wish to do for their real owners, you'll be fine, you'll just pay more and you'll be a slave of your tools.
Re:Be sure to vote with your wallet (Score:5, Informative)
This decision has no impact on games or on people using 3D software as the parent has suggested in his comment, since the nv driver had no 3D capability anyways. Development is continuing on nVidia's high quality 3D driver. There is no reason to vote with you wallet.
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Sure, Vista/7 ships with drivers, and so could Linux if the GPL didn't prohibit it.
What part of the GPL prohibits shipping a completely separately licensed binary with it? Ubuntu's graphics are more encumbered than the GPL and yet they ship on the CD.
Now, nVidia's license, that's a more likely reason.
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Nvidia just happens to contain a few people that have already been burnt that way and don't want to release anything that could be used as evidence by a patent troll.
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I used to work somewhere that exclusively supported 3D on Linux with nVidia cards (we didn't release on Windows).
The drivers and the hardware are simply better on Linux than the competition. If you're trying to develop serious 3D applications on Linux, it's still the way to go. As someone else pointed out, it's not like nVidia's drivers are open source on Windows.
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I have just one question: Why? If it's a choice between Catalyst (AMD's binary driver) and nVidia's binary driver, I'd take nVidia any day of the week on any platform. The two reasons I have a HD5850 in this machine is that a) It's a helluva fast card at a decent price for what it is and b) AMD has been opening their specifications and is building an open driver. Right now though my experience is that the binary driver under Windows is still buggy - far buggier than nVidia, and so far there's no 2D/3D accel
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Actually you can, it "just" requires that the laptop uses MXM [wikipedia.org] modules. Granted, MXM modules aren't exactly easy to find, and there aren't that many notebook models using them, but you can in fact swap graphics adapters in laptops.
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HAHA, good joke. Nvidea drivers for linux are more for render farms. OSX is not killing any workstations either.
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There may not be a lot of Linux gamers, there are a *lot* of science/engineering people using (or wanting to use) GPUs to do general purpose computation. GPGPU a hot topic in some of those communities, and some organizations are spending research money on finding ways to use them. Looking at the CUDA forums on NVIDIA's site, I see:
So I really don't think NVIDIA is going to stop provi
Re:Be sure to vote with your wallet (Score:5, Informative)
Nouveau driver will work for those folks. The only reason they are killing nv it seems is because the Nouveau driver is actually better than nv.
This isn't a big deal (Score:5, Informative)
how it's handled is the big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
The big deal is in how it's handled.
ATI way:
They collaborate actively with the 3rd party open-source driver guys (RadeonHD project, etc.)
They publish specs to help them, and take efforts to make subsequent hardware more opensource friendly.
On the day they drop support for some old hardware from their official driver, they point to the opensource project which is mature enough by now for the old hardware.
Nvidia way:
Actively ignore that a 3rd party open-source driver effort exist (Nouveau).
Don't make the slightest effort to help them and don't release anything (well, on the other hand, they don't send Cease and Desist letters at least).
On the day they drop support for the own official opensource driver, they point to some other limited functionality driver (VESA BIOS based) so users have a GUI to download their official closed source driver.
They pretend Nouveau doesn't exist at all, despite the fact that it's gaining widespread usage: Specially since inclusion in Kernel, virtually all distributions are starting to use it, either in the current or the next iteration.
I mean that Nouveau is very probably what the 2.6.34 / 2.6.35 kernel-based distros are going to offer to Fermi owner (although very probably 2D only support).
They could at least acknowledge its existence, even if only with the proper "Not supported by Nvidia" warnings.
nVidia also ran? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Maybe nVidia is following the path SGI did?
Work hard, become top dog, and then sit on your haunches licking your nuts while your formerly-inferior competition whips by you.
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Open matters..... (Score:3, Interesting)
In the past, I've made it a point to buy nvidia cards, because of it's Linux support, even though that support wasn't Free as in Freedom. They are a for profit company, who supported a binary driver for my favourite GNU/Linux OS. (I am in favour of the whole for profit idea, but believe there is a place for open source software in it, like Red Hat.) However, since ATI was bought by AMD, and are putting out a truly free driver for their cards, I will buy exclusively ATI cards in the future.
Open matters when I vote with my wallet. This will cost them my business at the very least.
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True, but for now, IMHO, the ATI stuff pretty much sucks. I went back from AMD / ATI to Intel nVidia because of stability issues (OK, the instability of the SATA implementation was a lot more problematic than the video problems, but still). And even now I cannot really use Compiz 3D effects on my 64 bit Ubuntu, without all kind of video and 3D issues.
Slow news day? (Score:5, Insightful)
As nouveau reaches maturity, nvidia is simply putting the 'nv' driver out of its misery.
Were nvidia to discontinue its binary driver, now that would be news but it isn't.
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No surprise (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want hardware-accelerated OpenGL without lots of headache in Linux, you want Nvidia.
If you want hardware-accelerated OpenGL that supports more than OpenGL 1.4 (which is an ancient version), you want Nvidia.
ATI/AMD: driver headaches to no end. *Correct* OpenGL code causes kernel freezes, graphics glitches and so on.
Intel: the older GMAs have terrible OpenGL support and are performance-wise in the 90s. The newest GMAs are OK for low-end stuff, but only because they are actually PowerVR SGX chips, and not made by Intel.
Corporate culture shows itself sooner or later. (Score:2)
and voila. companies may go against their corporate culture in accordance with the needs of the times, but in the long run, they cant avoid showing themselves for what they are. like microsoft blowing with the china-censorship issue and negating all the positive pr they and bill gates tried to do in the last years, nvidia also showed its own nature.
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punish with your wallet (Score:2)
They screwed me with the nvlddmkm driver. I won't patronize them. The open source community should do the same. They will only change their f***** behavior when it hurts ecnomically.
Is It Worth nVidia's Time? (Score:2, Interesting)
Honest question - is it really worth their time (and costs) to write open-sourced drivers for Linux?
Has anyone quantified the sales to show that Linux is a worthwhile market segment?
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They could just open the driver they already have. The code between the windows branch and linux one is supposedly quite similar so costs are probably pretty low.
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Are you considering graphics cards as gaming accessories or graphics cards as parallel math coprocessors for the medium-end number crunching on a budget market? If you consider the latter then drivers for graphics card, which bring support for OpenCL, will make linux a worthwhile market segment. Where do you find people crunching numbers? Windows? OSX? No. All the cool kids crunch numbers with linux. [top500.org]
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How much time does it take to publish the source code of their currently closed binary blob? Nobody asks them to write a different driver that they could open-source, as that would be silly.
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The issue with that statement is that you're not looking for Linux users as the multiplier, you're looking for open source zealots.
The nVidia drivers on linux are miles ahead of anything else on the platform in terms of quality vs features supported. For the most part, and excluding the brief periods after the kernel devs get frisky and change the driver APIs again, they just work, as well or better than any other Linux video driver and they provide a greater depth of features than any competing card or dri
So what happens to HPC with NVIDIA cards? (Score:5, Interesting)
Video support in X.org is one thing, but NVIDIA cards are also used for high-performance computing via the CUDA environment. OpenCL (a potential alternative to CUDA) is mentioned as being part of Nouveau, but CUDA is a well-established solution.
So what's the status now of HPC with NVIDIA cards?
Re:So what happens to HPC with NVIDIA cards? (Score:5, Informative)
Video support in X.org is one thing, but NVIDIA cards are also used for high-performance computing via the CUDA environment. OpenCL (a potential alternative to CUDA) is mentioned as being part of Nouveau, but CUDA is a well-established solution.
So what's the status now of HPC with NVIDIA cards?
Exactly the same as before: you use the proprietary driver, like you had to do before this annoucement anyway. And in fact, Linux has been supported better than Windows as an HPC platform by nvidia.
ok, Im confused (Score:2)
Does nVidia have a proprietary driver for their video card for Linux? Or is it just the Open Source one?
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There are 3 drivers for nVidia cards:
Since Nouveau is becoming mature enough to be the default nVidia driver in distros now (Fedora was the first, as far as I know)
ATI / AMD WIN's!!! (Score:2)
ATI / AMD WIN's!!!
not only do they have good on board video they also have open drivers as well.
Dear Nvidia - I've bought my last card from you (Score:2)
ATI gets my business now.
and this is a problem because.... (Score:3, Insightful)
if there is a market for a competitive open source friendly (hell, open source hardware) 3d video card, someone will make it. currently, it does not appear to economically viable to be both open source and competitive, in the 3d hardware world.
Until then, the binary driver will still exist.
Re:First (Score:5, Funny)
Whoops, didn't read your signature. I meant "humour."
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Whoops, didn't read your signature. I meant "humour."
I think you meant "humour", humour does regularly not have a full stop in it. I mean, your joke about British English falls flat when you use American punctuation guidelines. Punctuation marks are kept outside quotations in British English, my friend. Why? Because it makes sense.
Though to be fair; it falls flat to me. Because I only focus on details like the jerk I am.
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I have an PC connected to my TV with HDMI, it uses an intel X4500HD. What exactly is the issue with TV support you are having?
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Used to run 9.10 now runs 10.04. Only thing I had to do was switch the audio output to digital.
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I assume he means S-Video out, although I'm not sure what problem he's having; S-Video works fine on the Intel GM965 on my laptop.
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S-Video works fine on the Intel GM965 on my laptop.
Only if you want non-accelerated graphics, which doesn't work so well for playing back video.
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Re:And yet they're still the only cards... WRONG! (Score:5, Informative)
When did you last actually try using an intel card? I bought a new laptop in December, Intel X4500 inside, running Ubuntu 9.10.
It has suspended/resumed flawlessly for three months.
Last night I plugged it into a projector, click the Display settings, it auto-detected the new projector (listed by name even) and enabling output was a single click. Options to extend desktop or mirror it worked without problem.
Again, have you actually tried any this lately?
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Do your homework.
When you find a really good video card that does 3D well in Linux without proprietary drivers, please let us know.
Only we won't be holding our breath.