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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."
Video Card Reviews Monday, NVIDIA took the next step in their strive to own the Linux video market with the release of their 1.0-4349 drivers. These drivers represent a first in the Linux driver market, a utility that not only installs the drivers on any distribution, but also keeps the driver up-to-date. We now take a look at this new utility and the drivers themselves. We'll walk you through the installation of these new drivers, the capabilities of the new utility, and the performance of the drivers. Included in this review is the first look at a CineFX architecture card, the Quadro FX 2000 workstation graphics adapter.
NVIDIA has already been supporting linux lately, maybe poorly to some, but they are among very few who give a shit about it, so let them keep fine tuning, eventually it will be something rather beautiful.
Think of how long it took to perfect windows display drivers, they had what 15 years?
Linux is "new" to most people, it'll come in time and this is proof.
Posting useless rant since 2003.
Hardware just isn't up to snuff with ATI along with the impending doom... Doom 3 that is.
Everyone wants the final specs of Doom 3 first.
I know thats what I'm waiting on.
I don't like ATI drivers but they're hardware is always good. Nvidia is the reverse, I've had a few nvidia based cards fail on me in the past but the drivers were always great.
I recently installed the new nvidia driver for mandrake 9.1. The good thing about this new driver is that it automatically figures out what all relevent stuff needs to be installed. (Earlier u had to download specific drivers based on your distribution version). But after installing the new driver, I found out that it *did not* modify the xfree86 config file, which I had to go and manually change. Although it was not difficult, but still it can be complicated for an newbie.
All seven of us that run 3D apps in Linux are happy.
/. is open sources worst enemy.
Very few of these projects have the funding to run a webserver that can withstand a slashdotting.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
Monday, NVIDIA took the next step in their strive to own the Linux video market with the release of their 1.0-4349 drivers. These drivers represent a first in the Linux driver market, a utility that not only installs the drivers on any distribution, but also keeps the driver up-to-date. We now take a look at this new utility and the drivers themselves. We'll walk you through the installation of these new drivers, the capabilities of the new utility, and the performance of the drivers. Included in this review is the first look at a CineFX architecture card, the Quadro FX 2000 workstation graphics adapter.
./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4349.run --help ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4349.run [options]
./nvidia-installer installation utility.
./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4349.run, but do not
./nvidia-installer
The New Utility
Let's start this review by pointing you to a Bjorn3D article that talks about the Linux advantage. Their article basically takes you through a press briefing that the media received from NVIDIA. It's a good article that talks about NVIDIA's stance on Linux and what they hope to accomplish in the Linux sector. It would have been the intro here but they did such a good job....
Now let's get into the hard stuff and show you the goods. The new NVIDIA installer, based on the Loki installer, is designed to make driver installation painless. Let's walk through a standard installation:
Grab the Linux driver from NVIDIA's website here: http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-4 349/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4349.run
Run the utility by typing "sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4349.run".
You'll be greeted with the screen shown below. This screen simply displays the license and asks you to either accept or deny it.
Once you've accepted the license, the utility will check for a kernel module that has been pre-compiled. If it does not find one, it will then ask if you want to check the NVIDIA ftp site for a module.
If you say "Yes" to the above question, the utility will go check and will return with either a module or a statement that you will need to build a module from scratch. Since we were working with a custom compiled kernel, we got the later.
When you select "OK", the utility will then go to work and compile the new module and proceed to install the rest of the driver package.
That's it. You will finally receive a screen stating that installation was a success and now all you need to do is configure your XF86Config file.
Now that you've seen how easy this installation can be, we'll now show you all the options that the installer has:
glacier src #
This program will install the NVIDIA Accelerated Graphics Driver for
Linux-x86 1.0-4349 by unpacking the embedded tarball and executing
the
Below are the most common options; for a complete list use
'--advanced-options'.
--info
Print embedded info (title, default target directory) and exit.
--check
Check integrity of the archive and exit.
--extract-only
Extract the contents of
run 'nvidia-installer'.
The following arguments will be passed on to the
utility:
-a, --accept-license
Bypass the display and prompting for acceptance of the NVIDIA
Software License Agreement. By passing this option to
nvidia-installer, you indicate that you have read and accept
the License Agreement contained in the file 'LICENSE' (in the
top level directory of the driver package).
--update
Connect to the NVIDIA ftp server 'ftp://download.nvidia.com'
and determine the latest available driver version. If there is
a more recent driver available, automatically download and
install it. Any other options given on the commandline will be
passed on to the downloaded driver package when installing it.
-v, --version
Print the nvidia-in
While in a practical way it's good that you can enable the Linux kernel and XFree86 to make use of NVidia's hardware, I'm not very thrilled about the fact that NVidia provides this driver.
Some people seem to believe that these drivers are Free Software (well, they usually say "open source"), simply because you compile the glue between the binary and the kernel, but this is not the case. The NVidia drivers are proprietary software, and it's a problem when a task can only be done using non-free software. Since I (regretably) own an NVidia card, I've had to make the choice between 3d acceleration, or using only free software on my computer. Obviously, I chose the latter.
So, I would discourage people from using these drivers, and instead support a vendor whose boards do have fully functional Free drivers (these don't have to be provided by the vendor directly). Unfortunately, I haven't a clue as to what that vendor would be.
Is anyone out there competing with NVIDIA for the linux 3D graphics market? I know ATI released some binary drivers but haven't heard how complete or stable they are. Can anyone comment on this?
Command line? Like, ohmigod, ew!
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
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".
Linux simply can't handle the server load. Only Microsoft has the e-business solutions to meet your needs! LINUS HAS FAILED IT
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.
The drivers work great on my RH8 machine with my Geforce2 card. But I've switched back to the XFree86 drivers right after. Why? They still don't support power management. All I want is for my monitor to turn off after a while. Not possible. From the README:
KNOWN LAPTOP ISSUES
o Power Management is not currently supported.
*sigh*
I have an A7N8X Deluxe and I have Mandrake 9 running just fine on it.
0 -0248
c e
It took a few minutes of searching the web, but the sound fix is on Mandrake's site.
Oh! after a little googling, I found NVidia has mandrake specific drivers that apparently work like a rested engineer.
http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=linux_nforce_1.
Anyway, here's the patch that worked on my system incase the new NVidia drivers work like a monkey on acid:
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/errata.php3#nfor
Hope this helps.
-Derick
Nope, it will still be as much fun as a PD Amiga game. Actually they could be quite fun, so its not quite fair ;-)
Frozen bubble on the other hand is a very nice game, as is nethack. Hmmm... I notice a pattern.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
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
Apparently the author thinks only about 3D performance. That's the only explanation for the fact that he recommends the previous drivers over the latest ones.
The latest drivers fix a lot of issues with 2D performance, which could affect every day usage a lot.
Moreover, they fix compile issues on several kernel versions.
If you're desperate after 3D performance and don't care about anything else period, then stay with the previous drivers. Otherwise everyone is encouraged to upgrade.
I currently have a GeForce2GTS and have tried many of the drivers from NVidia with sporadic stability (yes, I've posted to their forums... no, they haven't been able to help).
I'm seriously considering a Radeon 9100... does anyone know how stable the current drivers from XFree are on this card?
Secondarily, how does the performance compare between the above two cards (under Linux)?
Yes, I do occasionnally use 3D in Linux (I don't use MS-Windows at all)... bzflag and UT mostly.
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
SuSE 8.1 or below should use the FTP site to download the RPM's for the driver, I believe it has something to do with interoperability of the new Loki style installer and Sax2.
:). But in the US 8.2 won't ship until mid-april.
SuSE 8.2 users should be fine
StarTux
Nitpicking to 97% of Linux users out there, but it looks like it's only for the IA32 platform. That rules out my PowerPC. Of course, the card that is under review probably doesn't work on the Mac Platform anyway. *sigh*