Those efforts should be put on open source friendly cards.

Posted Mar 31, 2009 17:11 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: Those efforts should be put on open source friendly cards. by Cyberax
Parent article: Testing Out The Nouveau Driver On Fedora 11 (Phoronix)

> NVidia's driver is proprietary, but it's actually quite good.

It's quite _fast_. What is "good" is much more subjective. It's crash happy and makes end user's lives more difficult when it comes to keeping their machines up to date.

Nvidia is the only game in town when it comes to having high performance GPU drivers, right now. If you need your machine for other purposes it may be best to stay away from it.

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The nice thing about reverse engineered drivers is that it puts a nice shot through the heart about the theory that keeping your drivers closed source is going to prevent people from learning how your hardware operates.

That is if a few open source folks operating on the internet with a shoestring budget can learn enough about the hardware for working 3D drivers (which is going to be exponentially more complex then pretty much any other hardware device on your computer) then trying to hide your hardware interfaces behind a wall of machine code is a huge waste of time. Imagine what a couple guys getting paid full time from ATI can learn about that hardware using high-end equipment and such.

Dispelling myths and illusions about 'IP' like that is more then worthy enough for a reverse engineered Nvidia driver.

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Those efforts should be put on open source friendly cards.

Posted Mar 31, 2009 23:13 UTC (Tue) by PaulWay (guest, #45600) [Link] (2 responses)

I think statements like "crash happy" and "expensive" and "fast" are pretty subjective without supporting evidence. The evidence I've seen is that NVidia's cards are slightly cheaper on the bang-for-the-buck scale, and the NVidia proprietary driver has been a lot more stable than the ATI cards until relatively recently.

I see it as basically a problem of inertia. NVidia's managers probably see themselves as doing their bit for open source, but they grew up in the 3Dfx/Matrox/Trident world where everything was fiercely competitive - to open source their drivers is probably seen as giving their competitors an advantage. So they do their part by at least giving us something, but still want to keep their secrets.

This 'competitive advantage' is really a fiction, as the architectures of the chips even in the NVidia range are different enough to require separate handling per chip - the difference between the processing architectures of ATI and NVidia and Intel graphics chips must be a gigantic chasm compared with the gap between individual chips. It's also pretty much irrelevant given all the standard arguments for open sourcing - lower development costs, faster bug spotting and fixing, better standards compliance and better community involvement to name the prominent ones.

I think we'll see a change at NVidia eventually. What it'll take is for someone internally to drive the process - compare Dirk Hohndel at Intel and Harald Welte now at Via.

Those efforts should be put on open source friendly cards.

Posted Apr 1, 2009 19:41 UTC (Wed) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (1 responses)

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/03/vista-capable-lawsuit-paints-picture-of-buggy-nvidia-drivers.ars

Microsoft's data strongly indicates that the problems were real. Damon Poeter at CRN dug through the documentation to find that on page 47 of the PDF, NVIDIA drivers were identified as the cause of over 479,000 crashes, or just under 29 percent of all the crashes Microsoft logged. Microsoft's own drivers follow, at 17.9 percent, and the "Unknown" category takes third place at 17 percent. ATI is in fourth place (9.3 percent) and Intel in fifth place (8.83 percent).

If they crash windows that much and the Linux drivers are the same driver shoehorned into Linux what would you think of their stability without other data?

Those efforts should be put on open source friendly cards.

Posted Apr 3, 2009 4:20 UTC (Fri) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link]

IIRC, those statistics were from shortly after Vista's release, when NVIDIA's Vista drivers were still incredibly immature. I don't realy think that source is very useful for determining the quality of a mature driver on another platform.