Pointless ideology? [LWN.net]

Pointless ideology?

Posted Sep 2, 2004 16:24 UTC (Thu) by AJWM (subscriber, #15888)
In reply to: Pointless ideology? by einstein
Parent article: Pointless ideology?

Nvidia - their video drivers are absolutely the best available for linux

No they're not, even if you confine your comparison to drivers for nVidia cards (vs the universe of Linux drivers or even video drivers).

No, the nVidia drivers are a prime example of the insidious nature of captive binary-only drivers. You think you've gotten a great deal. Just wait until nVidia decides your card is no longer worth their time to support, or you want to move it to a different architecture machine.

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Pointless ideology?

Posted Sep 2, 2004 18:34 UTC (Thu) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link]

They don't work worth a damn, for example, on Linux-PPC. And as Bruce points out above, their AMD64 drivers don't work well either. And lord help you (because nVidia won't) if you want to run one of their older PCI cards (Riva, TNT, etc) under Linux even on an x86 box, let alone PPC or SPARC or MIPS.

You and others have a point about non-x86 platforms. For ppc et al, nvidia is not a good choice now - but that could change, especially if "friends" like IBM were to lobby on our behalf for better ppc linux driver support.

However you are dead wrong about nvidia support for older cards - one nvidia driver supports all nvidia cards - from the lowly vanta to the newest high end card.

Pointless ideology?

Posted Sep 2, 2004 21:52 UTC (Thu) by AJWM (subscriber, #15888) [Link]

For ppc et al, nvidia is not a good choice now

Yet several models of PowerMac ship with nVidia cards (the high end ships ATI). Guess I'm out of luck if I want to try Linux on them.

one nvidia driver supports all nvidia cards [on x86]

You may be right about Quadro, GeForce and TNT2 cards -- although I can't comment on the quality of the drivers.

Pointless ideology?

Posted Sep 2, 2004 22:11 UTC (Thu) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link]

But for Riva and TNT (not TNT2) cards, see http://www.nvidia.com/object/riva_drivers and note that only old versions of Windows, BeOS, and OS/2 are supported. (The OS/2 driver also supports Vanta and TNT2.)

Ah, so the most ancient nvidia cards are not covered by their unified driver? my mistake, I thought that was the case, but apparently the tnt 2 are the oldest supported cards. Then again, don't the riva and tnt cards work in 2D?

If I were looking for 3D support on linux, I wouldn't start with an ancient riva or tnt - tnt 2s are available online for $16, or if you want a good older 3D card with open source drivers, voodoo 3s are still available quite cheaply if you know where to look.