Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews) [LWN.net]

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

Posted Jun 28, 2008 11:16 UTC (Sat) by alankila (subscriber, #47141)
Parent article: Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

I for one wish to thank nvidia for what I have always felt has been the best graphics hardware
for Linux. Looking back at a decade timescale: without it, we might have had nothing that
works in practice, as the ATI drivers have always been crap and nobody else has any
performance.

I view myself as a pragmatist and do not care for open vs. closed as long as it works and does
what I want. I'm just an end user after all.

However, this decade-long love affair will end if a high-performance open source driver for
ATI or Intel catches up. All else being equal, openness wins. Obviously. So, do we have open
drivers that work perfectly in Linux (compiz, 3D games like UT2007, etc.) and play the latest
crop of games in Windows at the same time?

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Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

Posted Jun 28, 2008 19:15 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

If you are a pragmatist then you should know that intel hardware actually works. No tweaking
required to get it working. It is certainly good enough for compiz and other basic OpenGL
stuff. AMD/ATI will have free drivers soon enough, hopefully, and then their hardware will
Just Work as well.

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

Posted Jun 28, 2008 23:19 UTC (Sat) by alankila (subscriber, #47141) [Link]

It might work but my impression is that it works slowly. Gaming is an important application
for me and the only reason I keep That Other OS around, for instance. At the moment I find it
impossible to find even a review that would compare some Intel chipset against the latest, or
even older crop of NV or ATI hardware.

I've historically always got bad experience with AMD/ATI hardware, although it must be said
that the laptop I am typing on is based on X1250, and it is the first time that 3D seems to
work. It did sure have trouble before with compiz: at some point using xserver-xgl did the
thing, then xorg update broke that for months, then it started working again, but the display
flickers a bit, especially with non-fullscreen video modes. Plus I can see a diagonal line on
the screen during screen updates, it must be rendering the screen as a texture with two giant
triangles. And it works quite slowly...

So my opinion for the two reasons above is that NVidia is still the king.

By the way, I think it is acceptable level of "tweaking" that one has to do something like
"apt-get install nvidia-glx" or "apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx". If I recall correctly,
that is pretty much all it takes today to have them work. (And Ubuntu naturally suggests
installing this stuff using that restricted driver thingy.)

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

Posted Jun 28, 2008 23:40 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

I made a live Cd with games for someone. Worked nicely on my Intel. Didn't "work" on his
nVidia. Even though I had all the required packages (probably).

And even to get that far I had to go through extra setup.

Would I recommend anybody to buy nVidia? sure no. I'd like to make it easy for me to help
people.

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

Posted Jul 5, 2008 16:09 UTC (Sat) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

I think that you are being disingenuous when you say that there is no tweaking required. I had
to enable a magic option (EXANoComposite) in my xorg.conf file in order to get anything
working at all on my Samsung Q45 (Intel X3100 powered). Without it, no icons or fonts are
rendered). If I was not an expert user, I would not have known where to begin looking for help
on this one.

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

Posted Jul 11, 2008 14:50 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

So, do we have open drivers that work perfectly in Linux (compiz, 3D games like UT2007, etc.) and play the latest crop of games in Windows at the same time?

I have been using ATI R2xx-R4xx cards with free drivers for quite some time; currently I am using an X850XT (R480). I have played a bit with Compiz (from some Knoppix Live CD) for a while, and it worked nicely. I have also played UT2004 and it works acceptably (at about half the frame rate of Windows) on cards with 256MB, but on a few levels there are graphics errors; I expect that these are fixed in newer versions of the driver (I am using Debian Etch, i.e., somewhat oldish). Concerning UT3 (there is no UT2007), I have not tried it. More interestingly, you may also want to run free games: for (at least) FlightGear you need to do some additional setup stuff to make it playable.