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Anand Tours ATI and NVIDIA
logicalstack writes "The folks over at AnandTech have written an
expose on their visits
to both ATI and NVIDIA. Interestingly enough ATI's facility shrouded in secrecy and NVIDIA's is quite open, Including full color pictures of their server farm, and a pic of the NV30 test machine the 'Ikos.' The CEO even showed off the old school NV1 with 1MB of ram!"
Here
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Direct link to the article
They're binary-only because they don't own all the code used in them so it would break other licenses to publish it.
I use those binary-only drivers myself with a GF3 and have had no problems with X crashing.
I am sick and tired of hearing people say "it works for me". When a binary driver dosen't work for somebody it hurts us ALL.
Even a friend who went to SIGRAPH said that the poeple from nvidia said "oh, those crashes should be gone now". It still dosen't work. This is remaniscent of IS departments that think they are more important than the departments they are supposed to work for. If it isn't working for the customer, it dosen't matter what is going on with your setup.
I work at a place that used to produce binary drivers for linux. We were able after a time to remove the binary driver requirement, and now our device is supported in the Liunux kernel. Why can't nvidia at least do this for its older cards.
Well, I suppose we could go over the reasons for the billionth time on /., but there's no reason to believe that you'll listen this time either.
Oh well. Here it goes anyway.
The primary reason is that they cannot. They do not own all of the code that is in the drivers. There are extensive cross-licensing agreements between nVidia and SGI, dating back to the creation of nVidia from a bunch of ex-SGI engineers and the ensuing lawsuits. A good bit of the core code in nVidia drivers is essentially owned by SGI. nVidia cannot release that code. Period. End of story.
The secondary reason is that there is reason to believe that there are trade secrets in the drivers. Why do most people still favor nVidia over ATI? Because of the drivers. They work damn well most of the time, and the drivers you download today still support the original TNT. Additionally look at the GeForce4 and the Radeon 8500. On paper the Radeon 8500 was superior, and yet the GF4 beat it in benchmarks consistently. Why? The drivers. They were more mature, better written, and streamlined.
Don't like the situation? Fine, don't buy an nVidia card. What? Nobody else has 3d acceleration worth a crap? All the other drivers are just as unstable and slower too? Well, gee, maybe there's more proof that nVidia knows what the hell it's doing. Yes, it sucks if you're a *BSD fan or something else such that the binary-only drivers aren't usable, but, again, nobody made you buy nVidia.
Frankly, nVidia has spectacular Linux support. They release the Linux drivers within weeks of the Windows drivers and they're pretty damn stable (frankly, I suspect that if you have continual issues here that it's some other piece of hardware being marginal and pushed over the limit by running the card at full functionality). Oh yeah, and they're fully functional... don't forget that little bit.
It's really sad to see people whining for Linux support, getting pretty damn spectacular support, and then whining that it's not good enough. No wonder most manufacturers don't bother - damned if you do, damned if you don't. So why spend the time and money on a marginal market if you're just going to get roasted anyway?
> (and buggy) Linux drivers?
You might want to try switching from nvagp to agpgart, or vice versa, depending on your mobo.
I went from agpgart->nvagp a few months ago, and suddenly most of my stability problems with the drivers were gone.
Once again, FUD... I've posted this before, and I'll post it again:
SGI has stated, on a number of occaisions, that they are not responsible for the closed nature of nVidia's driver and that they have, in fact, tried to push nVidia into opening the drivers...
Please learn all the facts before posting that crap again.
Dinivin
This is certainly true for older hardware (pre GF4), and is again an artifact of the SGI cross-licensing with nVidia.
The GF4 chip is separate from the GF4 Quadro chip though - at least as far as pinouts go (it may be that the actual core is the same still, but fat lot of good that does if there aren't leads for the "professional" bits). The GF2/Q2 chips and cores were identical excepting a resistor, as you note.
There are also (allegedly, I certainly have not confirmed this) SGI-only features in the core. I can't imagine that these functions would be exposed at all in public drivers though, so I can't see that being an issue.