Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

Posted Jun 26, 2008 14:47 UTC (Thu) by forthy (guest, #1525)
In reply to: Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews) by spaetz
Parent article: Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

I already went to AMD (780G chipset). AMD's binary driver fglrx isn't that much crap as it used to be, and they fully release the specs, so radeonhd is making good progress. Apparently, AMD is also the better option for gamers now, who wants teraflops for rendering realistic blood on the screen ;-).

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

Posted Jun 26, 2008 15:28 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (5 responses)

Yes. The amount of help that is coming out of AMD is admirable. 

They've released documentation, firmware, and other things. They even released the firmware
that they use for developing their own proprietary drivers. 

Their openness so far has outstripped what we got from Intel by a large margin. 

All sorts of stuff like that:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=am...

Like I mentioned in other articles we have open source 3D acceleration for R500 series
chipsets right now. I can't recommend it since I don't have one and don't know how stable or
complete the OpenGL support is right now, but if you want to become a part of the solution
then the R500 stuff you can buy nowadays is going to be x1650 and x1650pro. Pretty much the
modern equivelent of what the ATI 9200 was.  This is bleeding edge stuff, right now. So keep
that in mind.

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

Posted Jun 26, 2008 15:32 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

(not that I dislike Intel now or anything like that. I still like them quite a bit for having
good open source drivers)

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

Posted Jun 26, 2008 16:59 UTC (Thu) by zooko (guest, #2589) [Link] (3 responses)

Wait a minute -- didn't ATI/AMD's openness just *catch up* with Intel?  Is there any openness
that ATI/AMD are practicing with their graphics hardware that Intel wasn't already practicing
for the last couple of years?

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

Posted Jun 26, 2008 17:11 UTC (Thu) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] (2 responses)

ATI released their documentation before Intel.  Prior to ATI's specs, the Intel driver was GPL
but the only people who had enough documentation to work on it were all Intel employees.

Now that both companies have opened up the data sheets, anybody can work on the driver.

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

Posted Jun 27, 2008 17:49 UTC (Fri) by zooko (guest, #2589) [Link] (1 responses)

Okay, that's a good point.  I agree that releasing hardware specs is an important part of
openness.  Intel had fully supported, fully open-sourced drivers for years, but didn't have
open hardware specs until recently.

However, ATI/AMD isn't perfect.  They apparently withhold some of those specs in order to
protect their DRM schemes, and their strategic plan apparently involves spending their
engineering and marketing resources to produce and distribute closed-source drivers to
customers in order to support DRM.  See this long thread on Phoronix for details:

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7647&...

Now, I don't know if Intel does those same things or not.  I would like to find out!

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

Posted Jun 28, 2008 6:13 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> Now, I don't know if Intel does those same things or not.  I would like to find out!

They have to if they want to have full multimedia support for Windows Vista. Which is
something that they, and their board of directors, is going to want very very much.