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NVIDIA's Latest CineFX Card Under Linux
Nvidia Lacky writes "Ran across a new article from LinuxHardware.org that goes through NVIDIA's new driver release and also takes a first look at a CineFX-based NVIDIA card, the Quadro FX under Linux. Should be a good read for those that have been frustrated with Linux drivers in the past or that are looking to get a new workstation video card."
I did a format and install of RH9 last night and so in the process of getting it all to work, installed the latest nVidia drivers. Since I always run a custom kernel installing them used to be difficult. I can't tell you how surprised I was that nVidia compleatly re-wrote their installer to do all the work for me. It detected a "non-standard" kernel and compiled and installed for me. Smooth. I want to see more companies put that much effort into getting their hardware to work under linux. I wouldn't even concider another vender now unless they could demonstrate the dedicacion to the *nix world that nVidia has.
From my personal experience, I was trying to install RH6/7 about a year and half ago. My video card is ATI All-In-Wonder Ultra Pro AGP. Its a 32 MB card, with TV-Tuner/TV-Out capabilities. It was fairly new at that time as Radon cards were just arriving.
1) RH installation was in graphics mode, but after that X wouldn't start.
2) After subscribing to about 3-4 mailing list and about 1-2 months of digging i found that the Chip ID in the card was not compatible , and all that was required was overriding the chipID with that of a previous version of the card.
3) Then after about anout 1-2 months of digging i was able to get h/w based 3D accl. I recompiled my kernel/ X atleast 20 times during those day.4) Another month to get the TV tuner working.
I am not a Video Card hacker, but i can compile and install X, Kernel modules etc. But hadn't been for the good folks at http://gatose.sf.net (not goatse :-) ) I wouldn't have beeen able to get it to work.
So it took about 6 months from the release of the card for me to get it fully working.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Yes, and the real problem is that these companies insist on this dichotomy. I'm pretty sure NVIDIA could raise the price on it's consumer chips by 10% and eliminate the "professional" line with no loss of profit. The beauty of this would be (among other things) that consumer apps could use useful pro features like fast line drawing ;-) and fast pixel reads, which are disabled in consumer drivers.
It has always irked me when chip companies do totally artificial things to boost prices on some part of their line - like making 486 chips with a math coprocessor then disabling it to make "SX" chips. Silly practice.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Tux Racer is hardly the only game you can play natively under Linux. I am not talking WineX here, I am talking native Linux binaries. I would even venture to say that UT (original) runs even better under Linux with the nvdriver than it does on Windows with the Detonator driver. No, it's not free as in speech (it is free as in beer, however) but NVidia wrote an incredibly good driver that works under Linux and FreeBSD. Now if they would only support Linux PPC that would be really nice...
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Benchmarking the new workstation quadro cards with Quake 3 !!! heh hheh.
This type of card is optimized for giant data sets, zillions of polygons or nurbs at once. CAD/3D Modeling, etc. Think of the golum guy in LOTR.
Quake 3 has lots of blocky square guys running around at 300 fps on modern machine. Makes about as much sense as benchmarking it with the original wolfenstein.
This isn't what the card is designed for and it isn't probably going to perform as well as a card several hundred $ cheaper that is.
So, the review turns out to be not so useful.
#6495ED - cornflower blue