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NVIDIA to provide documentation for NouveauNVIDIA to provide documentation for NouveauPosted Sep 24, 2013 7:48 UTC (Tue) by imgx64 (guest, #78590)Parent article: NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau
I wonder if the SteamOS announcement has anything to do with this.
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NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 24, 2013 7:56 UTC (Tue) by MKesper (subscriber, #38539) [Link]
For a moment I thought hell would have frozen over.
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 24, 2013 8:20 UTC (Tue) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]
NVIDIA promised to work better with the community after Linus showed them that he was not very happy with them, and others. This is good, as their cards are definitely the best on the market, and though their proprietary drivers usually work very well, I really want to stay clear of them.
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 24, 2013 10:20 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] as their cards are definitely the best on the market Not anymore. And apparently nVidia is in deep trouble. It's funny, really: when company is in trouble it suddenly "discovers" FOSS community. ATI was quite happy with their own closed-source drivers, but when it was bought by AMD and lost some momentum it opened up the GPU specs, now nVidia follows the suit. Intel was never all that hot which is probably why it opened up first. We'll see what happens on mobile front: will Mali be able to gain the advantage and push PowerVR to the backseat? If that'll happen we should see “sudden surprise” reaction from Imagination Technologies, too. P.S. Only it does not work that way: sure, FOSS driver eventually become better then closed-source one, but it takes years and thus they usually don't come out fast enough to save the company from troubles.
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 24, 2013 12:37 UTC (Tue) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]
The first article shows that the flagship-to-come from AMD/ATI is hardly the power of a several-months-old NVIDIA product (the GTX TITAN). Although I'm happy that AMD can achieve this, it does not make them ahead of NVIDIA in my books. But you are right that NVIDIA may not be miles ahead of its competition (or should I say sole competitor?) anymore.
The S|C article is interesting read, as usual. And they are often more than _semi_-accurate :-)
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 24, 2013 13:05 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] The first article shows that the flagship-to-come from AMD/ATI is hardly the power of a several-months-old NVIDIA product (the GTX TITAN). The first article shows that $600 AMD card beats $1000 nVidia card. The second article shows that nVidia has no adequate response to that. Situation is similar to the release of Intel's Core. Prior to that Athlon 64 reigned supreme and Intel was only able to sell any Netburst CPUs because it had long-term contracts (some of them illegal) and supreme PR machine in place. After release of Core AMD fortunes have changed 180 degrees and CPU from AMD was never after a good deal speedwise (or powerwise for that matter). Today AMD only survives because it's GPUs (and consequently APU) are still doing great. nVidia is in similar situation: historically it was always slightly better, slightly faster then AMD (right after AMD's release of new GPU it had the lead and right after nVidia's release of new GPU it had the lead but usually AMD had the lead for a shorter time), but it looks like it's about to face few tough years. This may be the reason for today's announcement or it may be just a conicidence, but still, the fact that nVidia is in trouble (in more ways then one) and it's when it opens up is funny.
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 26, 2013 9:09 UTC (Thu) by mingo (subscriber, #31122) [Link]
You are comparing apples to oranges really: pricing of GTX Titan is so high because it's seen as the fastest card on the planet at the moment, so it can milk as much money from the "I don't care about the price of the GPU" buyers as possible.
Whether Nvidia has an answer to future AMD products or not remains to be seen, but the article you linked to was not very convincing to me.
In any case we all agree that nVidia opening up is very good news!
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 24, 2013 12:45 UTC (Tue) by lsl (subscriber, #86508) [Link]
> And apparently nVidia is in deep trouble.
You quote Charlie Demerjian on matters regarding Nvidia? On LWN? Seriously?
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 24, 2013 13:16 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Why not? He knows a lot about nVidia troubles and even if he exaggerates a bit his information about them is usually accurate. Now AMD is another matter—there he tends to ignore some dangerous trends and it's where he can not be trusted. The same approach can be used with Dan Dilger or any other fanboi: as long as you don't use him as source of information about Apple (where he tends to ignore all the potential problems) you can find many interesting things there.
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 24, 2013 16:43 UTC (Tue) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]
I like Charlie and followed the website before he took it subscription. But he's rarely even 50% accurate. The vast majority of his predictions end up wrong.
Don't get me wrong, I think nVidia is in trouble, but it's a long term trouble not a trouble that's going to happen in a year or even three. This trouble is Intel eating away at the bottom of the market. It's hard to make money and be successful when the guy selling the CPU's begins integrating your product. Their other ventures (HPC and Tegra) have been the less than stellar successes predicted.
Those are the reasons nVidia is in trouble, not the weekly "I hate nvidia" rant by Charlie.
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 25, 2013 3:58 UTC (Wed) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link]
Demerjian's fun to read, but every single time, every single one, he's there predicting disaster for NVidia, and with one notable exception, they've shipped perfectly acceptable products every time. I think it was the 280 that actually was rather a disaster, but everything since has been anywhere from good to great.
I don't know why he has such a bee in his bonnet about that company, but the man does not seem to be in the same reality the rest of us are, where NVidia is generally shipping cards that outperform its rival, while costing a fair bit less to make.
AMD's much stronger in compute in this generation, but from a gaming perspective, which is the largest market for these cards, meh, big deal. Meanwhile, NVidia provides actual gaming performance that's as good or better on a much smaller -- and therefore cheaper, and more profitable -- chip.
Yet, Demerjian was frothing about terrible the 6XX series was going to be, and then how awful the 7XX series was going to be.
The man is not credible. You shouldn't link him.
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 25, 2013 10:21 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Demerjian's fun to read, but every single time, every single one, he's there predicting disaster for NVidia, and with one notable exception, they've shipped perfectly acceptable products every time. Really? What kind of “disaster” he predicted that failed to materialize? Bumpgate? GT300 woes? Tegra 1/2 woes? GF100 woes? Or Tegra3 non-woes? Or maybe GK104 blameshifting? Or, I don't know, Tegra 4 problems? If you'll read his articles and compare them with what actually happened you'll see that he's usually pretty accurate, but that sometimes people expand the troubles he describes to unrealistic proportions. When Demerjian's talks about “nVidia's Tegra 1 & Tegra 2” problems they expand it to “nVidia's Tegra problem” and counter with Tegra 3, when he talks about “nVidia's trouble with mobile Tegra 4 line” they counter with bunch of tablet announces (not even releases so far—only couple of tablets and nVidia Shield were actually released) and when problems with GF100 are announced they counter with GTX 480 which does not use all 16 SMs! Demerjian may underestimate the power of nVidia's PR but his description of nVidia's technical problems are usually quite accurate. Too bad he does not do the same service for AMD. I don't know why he has such a bee in his bonnet about that company, but the man does not seem to be in the same reality the rest of us are, where NVidia is generally shipping cards that outperform its rival, while costing a fair bit less to make. And that is the power of PR I'm talking about. Meanwhile, NVidia provides actual gaming performance that's as good or better on a much smaller -- and therefore cheaper, and more profitable -- chip. Really? In which world 360mm² of GTX 560 are smaller then 255mm² of HD 6870? Or 221/294mm² of GTX 680 is smaller then 212mm² of HD 7870? Only in latest generation nVidia achieved smaller via bifurcation of their chips—which has it's own problems. The man is not credible. Well, yeah. If you'll carefully scan everything he write about nVidia, ignore pieces where he correctly wrote about nVidia woes and also pieces where he plain out says the short story is that Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) will win this round on just about every metric, some more than others then yes, you can piece together story of his unworthiness. But you can do such spin with more-or-less any author out there.
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 26, 2013 15:09 UTC (Thu) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]
> NVIDIA promised to work better with the community after Linus showed them that he was not very happy with them, and others.
I don't think Linus' petulant finger had much to do with this.
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 24, 2013 8:07 UTC (Tue) by rengolin (subscriber, #48414) [Link]
I'm not sure NVidia has anything decent in store, and it might be easier to use the (amazing) Nouveau, but SteamOS is free to use proprietary drivers...
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 24, 2013 16:28 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
But can you distribute an OS which bundles in the driver as-is? If there's a button the user presses to compile and load the module, that's OK (AFAIK), but distributing the bundle wouldn't work without getting an exception from kernel developers (which is less likely even than nvidia opening up their current driver). That could have been the forcing function here.
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 25, 2013 8:21 UTC (Wed) by tdz (subscriber, #58733) [Link]
Valve has been very vocal about their love for free graphics drivers when porting a game to Linux, and NVIDIA must have noticed this. They may have decided to open up a bit to not lose developer support in the long run.
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 25, 2013 13:19 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Well I think it probably has a hell of a lot more to do with the fact that Linux and everybody else is now moving to kernel-level modesetting.
Nvidia cares that people's Nvidia Linux systems boot with the same reliability and features that you can get from other graphics cards.
If they have to work around Linux KMS fuck-ups in their binary driver due to the fact that the Linux devs can't quite reverse engineer things correctly then that will make life for them and their customers harder then it needs to be.
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 25, 2013 20:25 UTC (Wed) by tdz (subscriber, #58733) [Link]
I'm sorry, but I don't understand your point. To my knowledge NVIDIA doesn't use KMS in their proprietary driver. They have a completely separate graphics stack in the kernel. So why would they be affected by problems in Linux' KMS. Also why would they start caring about this now and not 5 years ago, when KMS was new?
If it's not for Steam, I could imaging that they want support for Wayland without committing resources for maintaining a KMS driver. Supporting nouveau with documentation is the next best option then.
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 27, 2013 14:35 UTC (Fri) by Lovechild (subscriber, #3592) [Link]
The problem nvidia is facing is that distributions will be or is using boot splashes and/X technology that relies on KMS. They could at best screw up only a boot splash but the pain just grows.
If they inplement KMS support in their driver they will at least subject that part to the GPL2 clause relating to derived work. Effectively meaning at least the parts KMS support touches would have to be under the GPL2 like the Linux kernel. Nvidia really don't want that, likely for legal reasons. E.g. they might not be absolutely sure all their code base is licensed as to allow them to open source it, in cases of code that comes along with buying another company. The answer might simply be a complicated, expensive "we don't know for sure, better not".
Button line expect nvidia to be able to play this many ways. Initially it might allow them to easily run on modern Linux distributions with their existing code. Long term it might allow them to move some parts more in the open if that makes sense for them (e.g. the way Intel's Graphics drivers work in many ways)
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 27, 2013 15:47 UTC (Fri) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
Iirc Valve had a major problem somewhere.
And they said it was just great being able to debug the ENTIRE stack, and FIX the problem rather than just work round a problem in someone else's code.
Cheers,
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 24, 2013 8:43 UTC (Tue) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]
Very possibly, I'd guess.
Meanwhile, whatever the reason, it's welcome. Perhaps one of these days nVidia can come off my purchase-blacklist. AMD/Radeon (and Intel, but they seem to only do embedded graphics) might get some competition! =:^) (Tho I was stuck on the Radeon r2xx generation for several graphics generations, for similar reasons. =:^( But that's a few generations in the past now, and with this news, perhaps I'll be able to say it's generations in the past for nVidia as well in a few years. =:^)
Now if only "Sony, The rootkit people (tm)", would properly apologize as well (with "properly" including doing something of a similar order to what they robbed from their users to restore what was lost in both that incident and when they took Linux away as a Playstation option, as well)... maybe it could come off the blacklist too. Not that I'm really expecting it, but change DOES seem to be in the air in so MANY areas I wouldn't have expected a few years ago, these days... (Resisting the temptation to further off-topic enumerate!)
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 24, 2013 12:59 UTC (Tue) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
I'm a Matrox fan (this system is running on a G450 iirc), but they don't seem to do consumer level cards any more.
Last I looked at their stuff, you're looking at fancy prices in the £K region for fancy stuff, nothing in the consumer £50-£200 range.
Cheers,
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 24, 2013 13:20 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Matrox made a wrong turn many years ago: it refused to license GPU chips and produced all the cards in house. This reduced it's market reach, which in turn implied that it had not way to compete with ATI and nVidia. It's swan song wan Parhelia which was pretty cool card for video work, but was meh for gaming. And they have nothing more modern thus of course they left the consumer market.
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 25, 2013 14:27 UTC (Wed) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]
I wondered the same. The announcements seem too close together to be a coincidence.
Valve has been taking about open game systems. NVIDIA is fast, but not open, and Intel is open but not fast enough. This solves the problem (in theory).
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