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nForce2 GART Driver Finally Released For Linux

Posted by timothy on from the expanding-choices dept.

Rejoice, Radeon owners! For those of you who bought an nForce2 motherboard with the hopes of doing a bit of linux gaming on it, I'm sure it was a pretty hard let down to find out there was no AGPGART driver for the nForce2 -- until now. nVidia has finally released a kernel patch for the 2.4.20 release that is now providing GART support. Perhaps this means that nVidia is re-thinking their closed source-isms in favor of a more open policy in the future. A note on AGP 3.0: Note that AGP 8x mode is not available in 2.4.xx series kernels. If you find that X will not start, try disabling 8X mode in your BIOS. AGP3.0 has been implemented in the 2.5 series.

3 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. Re:nivida suck my... 9700 by Eric+Ass+Raymond · · Score: 0, Redundant
    What the hell? Can someone confirm that?

    I've been considering buying a mobo with nforce2 chipset, but if it not going to work with non-nvidia gfx-cards, there's no way I'm going to buy the motherboard!

    --
    BOO! TERRO
  2. As a consultant for several large companies... by despistao · · Score: 0, Redundant

    > As a consultant for several large companies, I'd
    > always done my work on Windows

    you're FUD (Fear, Uncertainly & Doubt) is too much off topic, try another day.

    PD: how much you get paid for your work?

  3. The results are excellent! by Boltronics · · Score: 0, Redundant

    nForcer users (like me :) who are on the ball know that it has been out for a while now. Unofficial support has been around for well over a week (it feels a long time when you've been waiting this long).

    I own a PowerColor ATi Radeon 8500 Evil Master II MultiDisplay Edition 64MB. Using Gentoo at 1280x1024 24bit, I get about 1800FPS with glxgears with the DRI 'radeon' kernel module, and over 2200FPS with glxgears with the FireGL driver (on XFree86 3.3.0).

    Previously, neither would work without the agpgart kernel module, so I'd be left with only 500FPS or so. Unreal Tournament 2003 is only available to ATI users on X3.3.0 with fireGL, so it couldn't be played.

    I must say that I am glad the new code is released under the GPL. I'm just sorry that nVidia nForce supporters had to wait so long when the board was apparently advertised as ready for GNU/Linux.

    Note that nVidia's proprietary drivers for its own video cards don't require the AGPGART driver as it has an implementation of it already built in. I was using a cheap nVidia MX440 card until this new driver (as I gave up waiting), and I can say that the nVidia proprietary driver has a very similar speed to the new GPL one, so nVidia video card users need not bother with this news.

    --
    It's GNU/Linux dammit!