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NVIDIA Releases New Linux Drivers
mlmitton writes "NVIDIA just released new Linux drivers (1.0-5328). But the early reports by users are less than encouraging. People are weighing in with mostly bad news about how well these new drivers work. Some people are finding that Neverwinter Nights doesn't work and they're reverting to the old drivers (4496). I spent a few long hours recently trying to get the old drivers to work with Fedora Core 1 so I'm going to hold off on these new ones."
GNU/Linux gets dynamic shader compilers!h tml
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_9292.
Do these drivers export all the same extensions as their windows counter parts?
"Doesn't anyone find it odd that they reccomend the SAME drivers for an 8mb TNT card and a 256mb quadra or FX? The latest windows drivers are larger (8.5 Mb) than the amount of memory on the former!!"
Sure, but it's not like the entire driver file is being loaded into to the video card's memory. That's just to control the video card, you know? I'm fairly certain, as well, that the driver that is loaded is different for the newer FX's and the older TNT cards. I'm fairly certain, actually, that each generation has its own driver set inside these big releases.
hey!
this seems to be pretty common
:(
:-/
Sadly yes, it does seem pretty common. I've got a Radeon and I often find myself checking how people are finding the new drivers before getting them myself. It shouldn't be that way
But - 'may take a little while to become fully stable' - I don't think so. We're not talking about a completely new product here. They're basically just tweaking their existing code, and should do enough testing so as the release doesn't get a bad rep straight away.
What will you say the next time nvidia makes a release? 'Well, this is the newest set of drivers, so it may take a while...' er.. yeah
Anyway, I'm more interested in X. Come on XFree86, please make it so that drivers can be released independently of XFree86 releases. I don't care about anything in 4.4.0 expect ATI support!
Judging from the Drivers page and README, it seems they haven't yet addressed the problem of the computer not able to go into sleep/suspend while the driver is loaded. A bit of a nuicance for notebook users...
$cat
I'd consider bloat to be when there is very little increase in functionality, yet the cost in consumed disk space or RAM is significant. I would consider MS Clippy would be a canonical example.
Does KDE offer increased, and more importantly, useful additional functionality to you ? If it does, then you have decided to accept the extra CPU, RAM and disk space it requires. It could also be argued that the visual "beauty" of the environment makes your computer more pleasurable to use, which will increase your efficiency.
OTOH, if you consider KDE to be pure bloat, then you are right, you probably should go back to using twm, resurrect your old 486.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Following the news concerning the bizarreries in drivers XGI, we carried out some tests by modifying the file of drivers XGI so that the applications is not recognized any more (modification of the character string 3 D m has R K 0 3. E X E in 3 D m U R K 0 3. E X E for example) since the simple renaming of file did not make it possible to circumvent detection. The results are rather impressive, since for example one passes from 20.6 fps to 8.8 fps in the scene Mother Nature of 3DMark03 (1024*768, the total score follows the same tendency), or 88.2 with... 18.7 fps in the bench BotMatch integrated into Unreal Tournament 2003 (1600*1200). It will be noticed that the fall is however less in our own demonstration, more realistic, since the score passes "only" from 28.6 to 14.6 fps... Does D?ou come this deceleration? D?optimisations specific to these applications of course. These last are can be multiple, but the checking for example of plane l?integration of clip for the demonstrations (like NVIDIA in 3DMar03 at one time) n?est not verifiable without assistance of the developer. However, we noticed that when the driver detected one of the listed applications, it decontaminated trilinear filtering to make only the simple bilinear one, i.e. without any transition between different the level from mip map. Of course that reduces the workload by two (interpolation from 4 texels instead of 8). In fact being given the importance of the fall one can even wonder whether the second GPU is well activated "by defect"... Here to illustrate our remarks a screenshot under Unreal Tournament 2003 with the drivers d?origines, and another screenshot once that these detections are decontaminated: We used the order firstcoloredmip here so that the various levels of details is coloured in order to highlight well the difference at the level of filtering. Worse, under Halation with detection d?origine, graphic quality is really deplorable, has such point qu?on would be believed in 640*480 when one is in 1024*768, so that l?on thinks qu?il s?agit not only d?un trilinear problem of filtering. This problem is solved when l?on decontaminates optimizations, but blow one attends slide show. It should be noted that the function screenshot does not function correctly when Halo is detected by the driver, which prevents us from showing to you the difference in graphic quality. Here are which thus explains mainly why in the benchs running Volari s?en leaves relatively well, and why in less current plays for the benchs but inevitably less not played c?est the catastrophe. In our protocol of usual test using in major part of the not detected plays, Volari Duo V8 Ultra arrived indeed at 55% of the performances d?une GeForce4 Ti 4600, with in the best of the cases 77% of the performances of the latter under UT2003 and specific optimizations which go with (40% without) and 15% of better under Quake 3, since in OpenGL by defect and contrary to what occurs in Direct3D XGI decontaminates office trilinear filtering and also lowers by defect the level of detail of textures as you can note it by comparing filterings of ATI and XGI: With final, one can wonder which is l?interet for XGI d?integrer this kind of things in these drivers. Indeed, if XGI thinks that its chips are not enough fast to carry out a trilinear filtering, of decontaminating it completely as much drivers rather than to decontaminate it that in certain app
Ramadog,
I used to have the same expectations of Open-source users as yourself, and largely for the same reasons. Until recently, people I knew in the OSS community even paid for their OSS, given the chance. Of course, most of them never ran a Microsoft OS, either.
Upon moving to my current job, I suffered a rude awakening. The company I currenly work for is largely a Linux house, with the majority of the technical people solidly rooted in various Unices. Piracy is rampant. I was shocked at how many people were shocked that I purchase box sets of my distros (even those I'm "just trying out"). This behavior isn't limited to the Unix people, of course. The windows monkeys are just as shameless in their piracy, but I've come to expect that of the Windows world - it was disturbing to see this from Unix people, particularly after the setbacks we suffered when companies like Loki couldn't stay profitable.
I tend to be optimistic, so I haven't been quite as shaken by this as some of my older friends who have had similar experiences. I don't subscribe to the sentiment that OSS is wasted on people, but I am afraid that much of our community has a lot of maturing to do before we can honestly say that the philosophy behind Open Source is internally consistant. "I only pirate Microsoft Software" just doesn't cut it.
You're right, with a certain amount of effort whatever they're hiding in the closed source drivers can still be found and copied. However, the idea is to make it as unappealing as possible to try to steal the information. As it is now, someone at ATI would have to consciously make an effort to get that information. If nVidia opened the source, then any ATI developer could browse it, and inadvertently (or advertently, even) insert nVidia code into ATI drivers.
By your argument, I shouldn't bother with locks on my doors, because if someone really wanted to get in they could easily pick to lock or break a window. However, we lock our doors because it makes us a less inviting target, and thieves will move on to easier pickings. It won't stop them if they're determined to get in, but few of us have to worry about such targetted attacks.
The GPU-specific portions of the extensions are irrelevent to the OpenGL standards, so why open the source? And I'm sure if ATI wanted to license nVidia's driver techniques, nVidia would be more than happy to do so and give ATI the source. That doesn't mean you or I would see it, though.
and people wonder why ATI suddenly comes out ahead of NVidia.
Last I checked ATI didn't have the best linux support either. I have a friend with the misfortune of having the Nforce chipset motherboard and a Radeon graphics card. Good luck getting the two to work together.
Open source kernel + 1 closed source driver may work just fine. But open source kernel + 2 closed source drivers can mean conflicts and incompatability.
It doesn't help that Nvidia's precompiled agpart driver for the nforce board only supports nvidia graphics cards. After spending an entire day recompiling kernels, I was able to get either 3D acceleration and no onboard network, or no 3D but with the network working.
I'm sure I could have gotten it all working with enough time, but it wasn't my machine. Still, it shouldn't have to be that hard.
I am glad that Nvidia provides a linux driver, but I really wish they would provide open source drivers. If two many closed source drivers are added to the kernel, it will make it unusable.
Got Apathy?
I guess I must have lucked out. Reinstall my desktop today with Mandrake 9.2, and since the old one I have required a kernel interface compile (it's way too old), I downloaded the new one (5328), and worked first time I installed it. The only thing is that I can't load the GLcore module. I think sometimes you can't just take these forums as an indication of how wide spread the problem is. People who have problems are also the loudest ones.
OK this isn't directly related to Nvidia but more of a general inquiry. Are there any video card manufacturers who consider XFree86 users a priority, even a small one? For some reason I always had the impression that Matrox released good drivers for XFree86 and that they're video cards are generally well supported. Whenever the "X is slow" argument arises people usually say that X performance is contingent on good video drivers. So what are the best video drivers out there right now? I want to build a new box soon which will be used to dual boot Windows and Linux. I would like to be able to play games on both operating systems but if that isn't possible then atleast be able to have really good drivers for Linux for normal desktop use.
and it is the right type of thinking.
The question is though, who are they trying to protect their intellectual property from ?
For the moment, considering your example of door locks, I choose to use them, not because they make my house impenetrable, but they ensure that most, "casual" theives won't bother to break in, because the risk and / or effort is now higher than the reward. Determined thieves won't bother with trying to break the locks, they will just cut a hole in a wall, creating a new doorway. That is if my assets are worth the risk and effort involved in doing so.
So, who are Nvidia trying to protect their intellectual property from ? Who would gain the most from seeing it ? Individual end users, or their determined rivals like ATi, who have much more at stake, and possibly more to gain from discovering Nvidia's IP ? Assuming it is ATi or other competitors, which is what most people suggest when faced with this argument, then the "locks" that Nvidia have put in place are useless, as they will not stop a determined adversary, such as ATi, who may be willing to invest multiple $100K or $1M decoding Nvidia's drivers, using AGP bus analysers etc. The reward for ATi might be high, so the risk and / or effort involved in decoding the drivers may be worth it.
I really can't guess why Nvidia won't open source their drivers. However, I struggle to believe only reason I always hear - "to protect IP".
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Greetings,
For what its worth, I've always been happy with the Nvidia drivers.
So the 5328 drive doesn't work for me with ONE app, the fail back was efortless and I'm playing NWN again.
Kudos to the Nvidia team.
Cheers.
I've been trying for a week to get the stupid nFORCE drivers working so I can get my new Shuttle PC on the 'net with Linux, but it's just not working.
Why, oh why, oh why can't they just release these drivers in 'normal' format?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
The reason he wont include such drivers is because of legal and political reasons. Debian would fork the kernel in a second! They refused to even stock KDE because the precious QT was not free enough.
Anyway there is that and what if NVidia or any other company pulls a sco? What if Nvidia decides to charge for their drivers? Who owns the code for the drivers anyway? How can Linux be GNU/Linux if not all of it is open?
Linus himself would voilate the gpl.
He does what he has to do. What I would do is imate debian's installer in xconfig. THe debian installer tells you only gpl software is installed by default. Would you like BSD and closed source apps as well?
If someone replies yes, xconfig could then launch wget to download Nvidia or other drivers. This way the FSF fanatics can have their pure GNU system and distro's would be legally free since the user and not them decides. Of course by default they would have to have a pure kernel but the user can just recompile it.
Perfect solution.
http://saveie6.com/
- If the driver supplied by nVidia for its cards exhibited the same behavior (since I don't have any of their cards at home, I can't say if they do), what would you do? Lash up some sort of dongle to fool the card into thinking a monitor is plugged in, and hope you don't blow up your card? That doesn't sound like much of a plan.
No, of course not. That's a stupid idea.I'd run it through a disassembler, figure out which part of the program does this, work out a fix and patch the binary.
You may think that this sounds like a very difficult task - I would urge you to purchase IDA Pro and try a bit of disassembly with that. It is well worth the money -- no open source tool comes close.
(FYI, part of my job involves patching closed-source binaries to convert an old ERP system to use ODBC and SQL rather than ISAM files. It's not as hard as it sounds.)
It's funny, I have had tons of fun playing Heroes of Might & Magic 3, Jagged Alliance 2 and Alpha Centauri on Linux. It's true that they are not as new and flashy as NWN (bought them about 2-3 years ago, anyway), but playability is just fine for me. Haven't tested the new driver, though, so I can't say 100% surely that they work with it.
The DDR and SDR Geforce2 MXs are virtually identical in performance - the DDR one should be a few percent slower, as it has the same memory bandwidth but a slightly higher latency (IIRC).
That's because the SDR has a 128bit bus, while the DDR has a 64bit bus, at double-speed. Same bandwidth pretty much. It's nothing to do with cheap RAM.
If NVidia released their specs, not only would ATI be able to get some insight out of it, but other companies who aren't quite so advanced (like S3) could simply read the spec and skip a very significant portion of the design process for their next card.
Bull. When did nVidia purchase all the 3Dfx intellectual property? And how many generations of cards passed before they were able to incorporate this technology into their own line of cards? It's not like ATI or S3 could just grab the specs and have a competing product using that IP in any sort of competitive time frame.
Dinivin
It has nothing to do with keeping source code and techniques away from the competition, although the people who decide against releasing sometimes think it is.
Many major graphics card design companies out there use similar techniques in their software. I'd be willing to bet if you compared driver source code between ATI and nVIDIA you would find many many similar techniques. There's very little they can learn from each other at this point, and what techniques _can_ be copied would take development time to _actually_ copy, introduce risk, and not give them a sizeable enough competative advantage to be worth it.
You argue that seeing the source to the driver lets a competitor "skip a very significant portion of the design process for their next card". This is absolute rubbish. The code may give them a glimpse at how the underlying hardware is put together, but this is far from what is required to design and fab a chip.
I used to work for a graphics card company, and knowing what each register does doesn't give me even 1% of the tools required to build even a _clone_ of this 4-year old chip, much less a competitor to todays chips.
The real reason, of course is what others have posted: These guys have some licensed 3rd party source in their drivers which they are not allowed to release.
The new drivers work just fine on my system (like every other NVIDIA driver I've tried). I'm getting about a 10% performance improvement across the board. My specs:
Debian sid
Kernel 2.4.22
GeForce4Go 440 (NV17)
Pentium 4 2.0
i845 mobile chipset
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
another way to approach manifesting open source graphics card drivers would be to request ATI, NVIDIA, VIA., etc. to release the source for the drivers for their old graphics cards. let the companies decide what an "old" graphics card is.
i'm imagining many open source folks would gladly put energy into stabilizing some older non-bleeding edge graphics cards. if this proved popular a new competition might emerge between graphics cards manufacturers to be the first to release the source for hardware that isn't bleeding edge.