Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Hardware

NVIDIA's Latest CineFX Card Under Linux 198

Posted by timothy from the compatibility dept.
Nvidia Lacky writes "Ran across a new article from LinuxHardware.org that goes through NVIDIA's new driver release and also takes a first look at a CineFX-based NVIDIA card, the Quadro FX under Linux. Should be a good read for those that have been frustrated with Linux drivers in the past or that are looking to get a new workstation video card."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

NVIDIA's Latest CineFX Card Under Linux More

NVIDIA's Latest CineFX Card Under Linux

Comments Filter:
  • Video Card Reviews Monday, NVIDIA took the next step in their strive to own the Linux video market with the release of their 1.0-4349 drivers. These drivers represent a first in the Linux driver market, a utility that not only installs the drivers on any distribution, but also keeps the driver up-to-date. We now take a look at this new utility and the drivers themselves. We'll walk you through the installation of these new drivers, the capabilities of the new utility, and the performance of the drivers. Inc

    • Not so useful (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mixmasta ( 36673 )
      Benchmarking the new workstation quadro cards with Quake 3 !!! heh hheh.

      This type of card is optimized for giant data sets, zillions of polygons or nurbs at once. CAD/3D Modeling, etc. Think of the golum guy in LOTR.

      Quake 3 has lots of blocky square guys running around at 300 fps on modern machine. Makes about as much sense as benchmarking it with the original wolfenstein.

      This isn't what the card is designed for and it isn't probably going to perform as well as a card several hundred $ cheaper that
    • Apparently the author thinks only about 3D performance. That's the only explanation for the fact that he recommends the previous drivers over the latest ones.
      The latest drivers fix a lot of issues with 2D performance, which could affect every day usage a lot.
      Moreover, they fix compile issues on several kernel versions.
      If you're desperate after 3D performance and don't care about anything else period, then stay with the previous drivers. Otherwise everyone is encouraged to upgrade.

  • Another step. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by st0rmcold ( 614019 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @04:03PM (#5655075) Homepage

    NVIDIA has already been supporting linux lately, maybe poorly to some, but they are among very few who give a shit about it, so let them keep fine tuning, eventually it will be something rather beautiful.

    Think of how long it took to perfect windows display drivers, they had what 15 years? :P

    Linux is "new" to most people, it'll come in time and this is proof.
    • So in other words, Windowsdrivers for the Hercules and other monochromecards should been perfect?
      I wouldn't put my money on whether XP boots with a monochrome card;-)...
      And windows hasn't really been around for 15 years (not as a usuable system anyway, anything before win 3 was Hardware change all the time, it all comes down to who has got the money to implement stuff and pay for licences...

      • Thanks for that useless rant, let me clarify, video cards and drivers are now very high quality because windows has been mainstream for a long time, simple enough for you?

        Linux is new to mainstream, if it even is mainstream at all, so it will take time for it to develop, it has nothing to do with how good support is for a 1st generation video card, I don't know where you pulled that from.

  • CineFX will flop for a while (Score:3, Insightful)

    by notbob ( 73229 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @04:03PM (#5655076)
    Hardware just isn't up to snuff with ATI along with the impending doom... Doom 3 that is.

    Everyone wants the final specs of Doom 3 first.
    I know thats what I'm waiting on.

    I don't like ATI drivers but they're hardware is always good. Nvidia is the reverse, I've had a few nvidia based cards fail on me in the past but the drivers were always great.
    • Hmm perhaps they should merge?

      Or not

  • It is good *but* can be better (Score:3, Informative)

    by vivek7006 ( 585218 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @04:05PM (#5655087) Homepage
    I recently installed the new nvidia driver for mandrake 9.1. The good thing about this new driver is that it automatically figures out what all relevent stuff needs to be installed. (Earlier u had to download specific drivers based on your distribution version). But after installing the new driver, I found out that it *did not* modify the xfree86 config file, which I had to go and manually change. Although it was not difficult, but still it can be complicated for an newbie.

    • I recently installed the new nvidia driver for mandrake 9.1. The good thing about this new driver is that it automatically figures out what all relevent stuff needs to be installed. (Earlier u had to download specific drivers based on your distribution version). But after installing the new driver, I found out that it *did not* modify the xfree86 config file, which I had to go and manually change. Although it was not difficult, but still it can be complicated for an newbie.

      It's nice that it can auto-dete

  • all seven of us are happy (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 03, 2003 @04:06PM (#5655098)
    All seven of us that run 3D apps in Linux are happy.
  • Now that the site is /.'ed, what's the price on this card?
  • From the NVIDIA Linux [nvidia.com] update.

    "NVIDIA Linux Update automatically detects the Linux operating system, kernel type, and CPU on a system and sets up the system for optimal performance and stability."

    Sounds like the kind of easy driver setup windows users enjoy. I hope Creative follows this format and I can get my sound card working without hours of pain.

  • My experiance (Score:5, Interesting)

    by insecuritiez ( 606865 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @04:08PM (#5655120)
    I did a format and install of RH9 last night and so in the process of getting it all to work, installed the latest nVidia drivers. Since I always run a custom kernel installing them used to be difficult. I can't tell you how surprised I was that nVidia compleatly re-wrote their installer to do all the work for me. It detected a "non-standard" kernel and compiled and installed for me. Smooth. I want to see more companies put that much effort into getting their hardware to work under linux. I wouldn't even concider another vender now unless they could demonstrate the dedicacion to the *nix world that nVidia has.
    • emerge nvidia-glx nvidia-kernel
      BR It's been that easy for quite a while now.
    • You're right that Nvidia has put a lot of effort into making their binary-only drivers work with custom kernels. But remember that all the complex installation would be unnecessary if the drivers were free software in the first place, and could be included with free OSes like Red Hat.

      In fact, Nvidia keep the specs of their cards secret, so not only will they not provide free drivers, they stop anybody else writing them.

      So by all means praise Nvidia for making the best of a bad job with their proprietary
    • Could you please explain, for those of us who don't have nVidia cards, why a kernel module compile is necessary? I thought the whole purpose of the driver loader in XFree86 4.0 was that it was completely system independent -- an XFree86 video driver built on one x86 OS would work on any x86 OS, regardless of version etc.

      Or is there something in the nVidia drivers that needs to exist in kernelspace?
    • I wouldn't even concider another vender now unless they could demonstrate the dedicacion to the *nix world that nVidia has.

      Hmm, Matrox? Bear in mind that Matrox release high quality documentation for all their cards, have donated hardware to driver writers before and so on. That's why the Matrox drivers are generally high quality, get all the cool new features from X and DirectFB first and (more importantly) work out of the box on new systems.

      To be honest, if I was going to build hardware specificall

  • I bought a A7N8X based system recently, figuring that I would have a single-vendor system as far as hardware goes (GeForce 4 ti4600 vid card). Surely this would be one of the best supported configurations under Linux, I reasoned...NVIDIA has been pretty good about Linux support.

    Now, here I am weeks later with no sound, under (updated) RH 8.0. Could someone please point me at a useful resource for diagnosing why sound isn't working, and fixing it? TIA!!!

    I wouldn't mind upgrading to RH 9, except nForce 2

    • A7N8X is a nVidia card right? I guess it's like the other mboards where nVidia supported a lot of stuff, ie. score the drivers from nVidia.com and pray that you'll get them to work...
      If not you're more or less shit out of luck ;-). They worked for me though, Slackware-8.1 and nVidia integrated-sound, ethernet and video... after some slight modifications to force them to compile ;-).

      Should work smoothly under RH though as it's the "supported" distro IIRC...

      • Should work smoothly under RH though as it's the "supported" distro IIRC...

        You'd think. Not so far, though...

        One error I did find in the readme.txt for the nforce2 platform drivers is that they claim:

        rpm -rebuild foo.rpm

        should work, however from what I can glean:

        rpmbuild -rebuild foo.rpm

        is actually correct.

    • Re:NVIDIA and Linux (Score:2, Informative)

      by BFaucet ( 635036 )
      I have an A7N8X Deluxe and I have Mandrake 9 running just fine on it.

      It took a few minutes of searching the web, but the sound fix is on Mandrake's site.

      Oh! after a little googling, I found NVidia has mandrake specific drivers that apparently work like a rested engineer.

      http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=linux_nforce_1.0 -0248 [nvidia.com]

      Anyway, here's the patch that worked on my system incase the new NVidia drivers work like a monkey on acid:
      http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/errata.php3#nforc e [linux-mandrake.com]

      Hope this help
    • The A7N8X [asus.com] is a motherboard made by ASUS [asus.com]. You can find more help at nForceHQ [nforcershq.com]
      • Thanks for the links...I did know about those actually.

        What I was really hoping for is some unified explanation of the Linux sound architecture. That would explain the relationship between /dev/mixer, the actual audio device, and the overall capabilities or lack thereof (3D sound, surround sound, etc.).

        I guess, though, if I find the right combination of incantations it'll "just work". ;-)

  • Article Text (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 03, 2003 @04:11PM (#5655151)
    Monday, NVIDIA took the next step in their strive to own the Linux video market with the release of their 1.0-4349 drivers. These drivers represent a first in the Linux driver market, a utility that not only installs the drivers on any distribution, but also keeps the driver up-to-date. We now take a look at this new utility and the drivers themselves. We'll walk you through the installation of these new drivers, the capabilities of the new utility, and the performance of the drivers. Included in this review is the first look at a CineFX architecture card, the Quadro FX 2000 workstation graphics adapter.

    The New Utility
    Let's start this review by pointing you to a Bjorn3D article that talks about the Linux advantage. Their article basically takes you through a press briefing that the media received from NVIDIA. It's a good article that talks about NVIDIA's stance on Linux and what they hope to accomplish in the Linux sector. It would have been the intro here but they did such a good job....

    Now let's get into the hard stuff and show you the goods. The new NVIDIA installer, based on the Loki installer, is designed to make driver installation painless. Let's walk through a standard installation:

    Grab the Linux driver from NVIDIA's website here: http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-4 349/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4349.run

    Run the utility by typing "sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4349.run".

    You'll be greeted with the screen shown below. This screen simply displays the license and asks you to either accept or deny it.

    Once you've accepted the license, the utility will check for a kernel module that has been pre-compiled. If it does not find one, it will then ask if you want to check the NVIDIA ftp site for a module.

    If you say "Yes" to the above question, the utility will go check and will return with either a module or a statement that you will need to build a module from scratch. Since we were working with a custom compiled kernel, we got the later.

    When you select "OK", the utility will then go to work and compile the new module and proceed to install the rest of the driver package.

    That's it. You will finally receive a screen stating that installation was a success and now all you need to do is configure your XF86Config file.

    Now that you've seen how easy this installation can be, we'll now show you all the options that the installer has:

    glacier src # ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4349.run --help ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4349.run [options]

    This program will install the NVIDIA Accelerated Graphics Driver for
    Linux-x86 1.0-4349 by unpacking the embedded tarball and executing
    the ./nvidia-installer installation utility.

    Below are the most common options; for a complete list use

    '--advanced-options'.

    --info
    Print embedded info (title, default target directory) and exit.

    --check
    Check integrity of the archive and exit.

    --extract-only

    Extract the contents of ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4349.run, but do not
    run 'nvidia-installer'.

    The following arguments will be passed on to the ./nvidia-installer
    utility:

    -a, --accept-license
    Bypass the display and prompting for acceptance of the NVIDIA

    Software License Agreement. By passing this option to
    nvidia-installer, you indicate that you have read and accept
    the License Agreement contained in the file 'LICENSE' (in the
    top level directory of the driver package).

    --update
    Connect to the NVIDIA ftp server 'ftp://download.nvidia.com'

    and determine the latest available driver version. If there is
    a more recent driver available, automatically download and
    install it. Any other options given on the commandline will be
    passed on to the downloaded driver package when installing it.

    -v, --version
    Print the nvidia-in
    • These new drivers are cool and all, but the 2d support needs alot of work. Try this for fun sometime.

      1. Install the nvidia drivers (last 2 revisions do this).
      2. Launch gkrellm and keep an eye on the cpu meter.
      3. Open any window and slide it around really fast. You'll see the cpu meter spike to 75% or more and stay there until you quit jerking the window around.

      Now really, does it need that much cpu power to move a window back and forth? I'm on an athlon xp2100 here! Ridiculous.
  • awesome! now i can run Tux Racer in such a crazy good looking mode that it actually becomes fun!

    • UT, UT2003, Quake III Arena, shall I continue? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MsGeek ( 162936 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @04:37PM (#5655347) Homepage Journal
      Tux Racer is hardly the only game you can play natively under Linux. I am not talking WineX here, I am talking native Linux binaries. I would even venture to say that UT (original) runs even better under Linux with the nvdriver than it does on Windows with the Detonator driver. No, it's not free as in speech (it is free as in beer, however) but NVidia wrote an incredibly good driver that works under Linux and FreeBSD. Now if they would only support Linux PPC that would be really nice...

    • Re:tux (Score:2, Interesting)

      by eyeye ( 653962 )
      Nope, it will still be as much fun as a PD Amiga game. Actually they could be quite fun, so its not quite fair ;-)

      Frozen bubble on the other hand is a very nice game, as is nethack. Hmmm... I notice a pattern.
  • While in a practical way it's good that you can enable the Linux kernel and XFree86 to make use of NVidia's hardware, I'm not very thrilled about the fact that NVidia provides this driver.

    Some people seem to believe that these drivers are Free Software (well, they usually say "open source"), simply because you compile the glue between the binary and the kernel, but this is not the case. The NVidia drivers are proprietary software, and it's a problem when a task can only be done using non-free software. Sin

    • Re:Nice, but not really a positive thing. (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It's called capitalism. All you open sourced communists don't seem to realise the millons companies have to spend on R&D. The driver code is part of that R&D, and has traditionaly been one of Nvidia's trump cards. If you think Nvidia is just going to give away their IP like, you (and all the others like you) need a reality check!
      • Er... the drivers are no use unless you have one of Nvidia's cards. To get such a card you have to pay money to Nvidia. This is capitalism.

        The reason for binary-only drivers suggested by another poster to this story - that they allow Nvidia to maintain a nonexistent distinction between 'consumer' and 'professional' hardware - is, if true, an example of market segmentation, a monopolistic practice. That is not capitalism or at least not well-functioning capitalism.
        • No, it's not useless. The structure of their driver, is faster, and more effecient then ATI's. It's widely held that ATI hardware is superior to NVidia hardware. Yet the NVidia still posts faster frame rates in a number of games, specifically because the driver is faster/more effecient, just better. Even when ATI was "cheating" (giving up quality to get frame rate, for the specific purpose of posting a better FPS, and not disclosing the fact publically) on Quake, NVidia was still eating their lunch. E

      • Isn't it possible that, say NVidia has developed some amazing way of compressing polygons to speed up data transfer to their card and do not with competitors to know about it?

        At home I use Linux, and I am very happy with it. However I believe that some flexibility in the open source approach is good. If somebody wishes to reveal their code, great. If not, let them play, too. Live and let live, as they say. A lot of companies are worried that the R&D money they invested in designing costly software i

    • Re:Nice, but not really a positive thing. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Erwos ( 553607 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @04:26PM (#5655260)
      That vendor doesn't exist, sorry. Matrox dropped the ball with Parhelia, and S3/VIA has never had an accelerated DRI driver to the best of my knowledge.

      Here's the problem: nVidia and ATI make professional and consumer versions of their cards with the same hardware. The only difference is a resistor telling the BIOS which one it is. The _drivers_ are what tell the card to use certain features. While I'm not sure exactly how much is BIOS, and how much is driver, I'm betting having access to the driver source gives you a way to enable those professional features on the consumer cards.

      Hence, not only are there no vendors like you want, but it becomes increasingly unlikely that they will pop into existence. Sorry.

      -Erwos

      • Re:Nice, but not really a positive thing. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Glock27 ( 446276 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @04:32PM (#5655302)
        Here's the problem: nVidia and ATI make professional and consumer versions of their cards with the same hardware.

        Yes, and the real problem is that these companies insist on this dichotomy. I'm pretty sure NVIDIA could raise the price on it's consumer chips by 10% and eliminate the "professional" line with no loss of profit. The beauty of this would be (among other things) that consumer apps could use useful pro features like fast line drawing ;-) and fast pixel reads, which are disabled in consumer drivers.

        It has always irked me when chip companies do totally artificial things to boost prices on some part of their line - like making 486 chips with a math coprocessor then disabling it to make "SX" chips. Silly practice.

        • They could only do this if their competitor(s?) raised their prices accordingly. Otherwise, they'd just lose the consumer market.
          • They could only do this if their competitor(s?) raised their prices accordingly. Otherwise, they'd just lose the consumer market.

            Perhaps, except that if software actually used the pro features, those other cards would run like crap by comparison.

            Also, you are presuming that NVIDIA wouldn't make up the difference in volume, as the thousands of firms using pro cards switch almost exclusively to NVIDIA. That wouldn't help those competitors much, would it?

      • I hate those snitching resistors that can't keep their mouths (gates) shut!
      • You might've been right a few years ago, but your comments on the pro and the consumer lines being made "on the same hardware" are no longer correct.

        It used to be that the Quadro lines used the same chip as the GeForce line, and that swapping a resistor (and the BIOS) would turn a GF card into a Quadro. Starting with the GF4/Quadro4 line, this is no longer true. I have a Quadro4 and the chip is most definitely different than the GF4 chip. Further, people have attempted to "hack" a GF4 into a Quadro4, an
      • It's very simple to mod a Radeon 9x00 into a FireGL... Just check out nvworld for details [nvworld.ru] This will turn it into the EXACT same thing as a FireGL(only drivers are that one resistor are different)

        Turning a GeForce 4 into a Quadro is also easy, however the antialiasing won't be quite the same...


        I don't see why they used those benchmarks... Measuring the speed of quake for a workstation card is kind of stupid imo.

    • Re:Nice, but not really a positive thing. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Tyler Eaves ( 344284 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @04:31PM (#5655292)
      Get out of your fantasy world.

      As you say, NO vendor provides such drivers. You know what? As long as zealots such as yourself keep making these sort of declerations, hardware companys will continue to avoid Linux/BSD/etc.

      Think of the message you are sending to vendors.

      Zealot: Hey Support Linux!
      Vendor: Urm, okay
      Zealot: Great! ...6 months later...

      Vendor: Here you go!
      Zealot: Hey, IT'S NOT UNDER THE GPL! BOYCOTT!

    • Re:Nice, but not really a positive thing. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Abcd1234 ( 188840 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @04:34PM (#5655322) Homepage
      Dear lord, when did pragmatism go out the window in favour of this zealous, excessive obsession over "freedom". Christ, do you ask that all cars be free? Or bridges? Or books? No? Then why software?
      • obsession over "freedom". Christ, do you ask that all cars be free? Or bridges? Or books? No? Then why software?

        Actually, I do want to be free to bring my car to any mechanic, or walk over the Brooklyn Bridge any time of day, or read my books anyway I please.

        Even if I may have to move to Paris, Freedom to do it.

    • It won't happen, for at least three reasons:

      1. Graphics accelerators are primarily designed for Direct3D command interface first. Some OpenGL drivers might simply convert OpenGL commands into Direct3D commands.

      2. Vendors may use proprietary optimisations in the device driver. This might include triangle stripification, deferred rendering or caching.

      3. Vendors may also use cross-licensed technology from other sources. Any NDA would prevent the disclosure of this information.

      The only way to have true free
    • The new (free) ATI drivers now work fine AFAICT - ut2003 works as well on my ATI 9700 as it does on my GF4 4800.

      My new cards will all be ATI from now on, unless NV make their driver open source soon.
      • Those free ATI drivers are just as free as the Nvidia drivers -- free to download, free to use, but the source code is not available. Thank you, drive through.

        The ATI Radeon 9700 and 9800 lines are superior to the Nvidia Geforce FX from a hardware point of view, so that's a good reason to buy them. But drivers continue to not be a good reason to buy ATI - they have a poor history on support and their Linux support is certainly not better than that of Nvidia.
    • I own an nVidia card and refuse to use the nVidia drivers, but for a more practical reason: stability. I found their drivers have a tendency to make my system unstable, mostly when playing with virtual consoles. I stopped using their drivers about a year ago, don't know if they really fixed them since.
    • Nothing I like better than to read the ramblings of a crack-head. I'm pissed at Ford, so I'm now I'm going to walk to work. Yeah that makes sense.
    • Sigh... We've been through this before.
      An OpenGL driver is a huge amount of code. We're not talking about a network card driver, that just bangs some registers, and can depend on the support of the kernel networking subsystem. An OpenGL driver is all of OpenGL. The NVIDIA driver encompasses everything from the header files, to the GLX module, to the kernel driver, to the X 2D driver, to the OpenGL library. This adds up to several megabytes of code. An OpenGL application interacts with the NVIDIA driver the
    • How nice that you've made a martyr of yourself. I can picture you standing heroically in the face of the oncoming storm, refusing to budge from your proud position of "I will use software to which I have the source code." How noble. How worthwhile.

      How pointless.

      • How pointless.

        I was an Amiga user in the 1990s.

        That period of being an orphan, in spite of the beauty and the speed, held enough heartbreak and frustration for a lifetime. Really, it was enough, and I can now say with utmost confidence and conviction that it will never, ever happen to me again. And the strength of this conviction is equal to what you will hear when RMS says that he has the source code to his printer driver.

        If something is not mine, then I simply won't have it. You call it pointless

  • I've got a GF4 Ti4200 running on linux just peachy. It plays Warcraft III (winex) in 1280x1024 with all the graphics turned up.

    The current setup for nVidia's drivers basically consists of installing the kernel module and using "nvidia" as the driver under XFree86 instead of "nv". The whole process takes about 3 minutes from download.

    Shouldn't you guys be reporting on smart bombs or something?

  • Competition? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by c3rb ( 655107 )
    Is anyone out there competing with NVIDIA for the linux 3D graphics market? I know ATI released some binary drivers but haven't heard how complete or stable they are. Can anyone comment on this?

  • My experience... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by frodo from middle ea ( 602941 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @04:27PM (#5655271) Homepage
    To cut the long story short Linux and LATEST graphics boards don't get along together. period
    From my personal experience, I was trying to install RH6/7 about a year and half ago. My video card is ATI All-In-Wonder Ultra Pro AGP. Its a 32 MB card, with TV-Tuner/TV-Out capabilities. It was fairly new at that time as Radon cards were just arriving.

    1) RH installation was in graphics mode, but after that X wouldn't start.

    2) After subscribing to about 3-4 mailing list and about 1-2 months of digging i found that the Chip ID in the card was not compatible , and all that was required was overriding the chipID with that of a previous version of the card.

    3) Then after about anout 1-2 months of digging i was able to get h/w based 3D accl. I recompiled my kernel/ X atleast 20 times during those day.4) Another month to get the TV tuner working.

    I am not a Video Card hacker, but i can compile and install X, Kernel modules etc. But hadn't been for the good folks at http://gatose.sf.net (not goatse :-) ) I wouldn't have beeen able to get it to work.

    So it took about 6 months from the release of the card for me to get it fully working.

    • Re:My experience... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by (startx) ( 37027 )
      Really? that sucks. I bought my gf4ti4600 a few weeks after it was released, popped it in, installed the NVIDIA_kernel and NVIDIA_GLX packages, changed the driver used in XF86Config and X started up beautifully with full hw accel.
      • Yeah I guess NVIDIA is much better in Linux support than ATI.
        gatose.sf.net is nothing but hardcore, hacking and reverse engg. of the cards, so its understandable that it takes a while for them to figure stuff out and support it. I can't imagine how may cards they must be buring each month :-).

        Al though i hear that ATI now has native linux drivers for some of its cards, not the entire range though.

    • Re:My experience... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Good God man, are you still running that two year old hardware?

      Seriously, though, your complaint seems a bit flat, as NVidia has done a huge amount of work on fixing this. I haven't had an NVidia driver issue with any of my systems in recent memory. In fact, we've been getting superb performance and easy installs for well over a year now.
    • Oddly enough that sounds an awful lot like the procedure to get that card working in windows.

      [/humour]
    • What does this have to do with the Nvidia installer?

      Really I am not looking back 1.5 years ago to see how things go when I get a new card, which hopefully will be one of the new FX cards.

      Is the FX actually out yet? If it is not then Nvidia have released a driver that enables use of the card before it even hits the shelves...This can only be a good thing, well one would think so :).

      StarTux

  • Yes, but why no APM (Score:3, Informative)

    by Riddles ( 2787 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @04:42PM (#5655385) Homepage
    The drivers work great on my RH8 machine with my Geforce2 card. But I've switched back to the XFree86 drivers right after. Why? They still don't support power management. All I want is for my monitor to turn off after a while. Not possible. From the README:
    KNOWN LAPTOP ISSUES
    o Power Management is not currently supported.
    *sigh*

    • Re:Yes, but why no APM (Score:2, Informative)

      by oznet ( 217754 )
      Eh? Works fine for me without anything special at all.

      What they are refering to is laptop style suspend-to-memory features. However, with a simple 1 character source patch to the nvidia driver everything works fine.

      I'm currently using my Dell C840 laptop with GeForce4. Suspend, AGP, everything works. See (suspend to RAM): http://jaeger.morpheus.net/linux/c840 [morpheus.net]

      • Re:Yes, but why no APM (Score:2, Informative)

        by DF5JT ( 589002 )
        "What they are refering to is laptop style suspend-to-memory features. However, with a simple 1 character source patch to the nvidia driver everything works fine."

        You are talking about the old 4191 and earlier driver versions.

        The new release cannot use the hack you are referring to.

  • It seems that, once again, the only UNIX that's figured this sort of thing out is Darwin. :P

    All hail OS X. :)

    Seriously though, does anybody have a good understanding of what the real issue is here? Is the problem the Linux kernel itself, or nVidia not putting development money into it? The fact that there is no legit OpenGL implementation, or the fact that nobody see's it as a priority?

    What's the biggest obstacle between Linux and proper, mature, accelerated 3D from a major vendor?

    • Re:Surprise, Surprise... (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      What's the biggest obstacle between Linux and proper, mature, accelerated 3D from a major vendor?

      Hardware specs. The manufacturers won't give them, or in some cases can't give them because they have contracts with other companies for licensing hardware designs or patents. TV-Out on ATI cards for example, is unsupported because ATI can't give specs because they have a contract with Macrovision. See this thread on gatos-devel where I explained this problem in more detail [sourceforge.net] (Note that I mention Macromedia ther

    • All I can say is, huh? You do realize that NVIDIA's Linux drivers reached performance-parity with NVIDIA's Windows drivers several generations ago? The latest Linux driver was release less than a week after the latest Windows driver. Their Linux drivers (with appropriate patches) work flawlessly on even bleeding edge development kernels. OpenGL on Linux is mature enough that SGI sells a bunch of x86 Linux machines with rebranded NVIDIA hardware, and ILM has switched to XSI (Softimage) on Linux for their nex
  • I'm on Debian. When I get this program and run it, it tells me that there are no kernel headers. How can I fix this?

  • How does this compare to the current ATI support? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Kevin Burtch ( 13372 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @05:43PM (#5655927)

    I currently have a GeForce2GTS and have tried many of the drivers from NVidia with sporadic stability (yes, I've posted to their forums... no, they haven't been able to help).

    I'm seriously considering a Radeon 9100... does anyone know how stable the current drivers from XFree are on this card?
    Secondarily, how does the performance compare between the above two cards (under Linux)?

    Yes, I do occasionnally use 3D in Linux (I don't use MS-Windows at all)... bzflag and UT mostly.
  • I sent a note to NVIDIA last night to thank them for the previous version of their drivers. One of the problems that is cited in article after article is that judging the size of the open source market is very difficult because the software is freely redistributed. Even counting downloads is just an estimation technique, because the files may get mirrored or cut on a CD and passed around.

  • SuSE 8.1 or below should note (Score:3, Informative)

    by StarTux ( 230379 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @06:01PM (#5656094) Journal
    SuSE 8.1 or below should use the FTP site to download the RPM's for the driver, I believe it has something to do with interoperability of the new Loki style installer and Sax2.

    SuSE 8.2 users should be fine :). But in the US 8.2 won't ship until mid-april.

    StarTux

  • Any distribution? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Buskaatt ( 124333 )
    Nitpicking to 97% of Linux users out there, but it looks like it's only for the IA32 platform. That rules out my PowerPC. Of course, the card that is under review probably doesn't work on the Mac Platform anyway. *sigh*

Slashdot Top Deals

Love may laugh at locksmiths, but he has a profound respect for money bags. -- Sidney Paternoster, "The Folly of the Wise"

Close