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NVIDIA Driver Developer Discusses Linux Graphics
An anonymous reader writes "Andy Ritger, who leads the NVIDIA UNIX Graphics Team responsible for creating drivers on Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris, has answered many questions at Phoronix about the state of Linux graphics, gaming, and drivers. Ritger shares some interesting facts, such as: the Linux graphics driver download rate is 0.5% that of their Windows driver downloads at NVIDIA.com; how the Nouveau developers are doing an incredible job; creating an AMD-like open-source strategy at NVIDIA would be time intensive and unlikely; and development problems for the Linux platform. Also commented on are new features that may come to their Linux driver within the next twelve months." Like all stories at Phoronix, in common with most other hardware review sites, this one is arbitrarily and maddeningly spread across 8 pages.
This was mentioned in the article. They do find it troublesome to measure their Linux user-base due to this.
Q: Overall, what percentage of NVIDIA's customers do you believe use Linux?
I don't know many concrete percentages. Highend workstation visualization is roughly half Linux, and Digital Content Creation (DCC) is largely Linux. NVIDIA Linux graphics powers a respectable portion of the 3D workstations. Our CUDA user base also has a large Linux contingent.
However, the number of Linux driver downloads from nvidia.com is only 0.5% the number of nvidia.com Windows driver downloads. Of course, many Linux users get our driver through distro packages and other means that wouldn't be measured in that download figure.
Measuring the size of the NVIDIA Linux user base has always been a challenge for us.
Italics mine.
I'd like the authors of some common troll s to note:
a) The most high profile binary kernel module distributor considers the unstable kernel API to be very little trouble.
b) One of the most high profile X driver cerators thinks that X is well designed.
so there.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
No it won't. I have dual 9800s and it runs WoW like a champ (read: no spontaneous system resets or strange/spurious bugs.) I'm unlikely to change to a card with an open source driver anytime soon, because what I have right now works.
I'm really mystified by this attitude - if a company produces a stable, reliable product with closed software and the market is willing to pay for it, what difference does it make? It's not like they are charging $$$$ for crappy product, like, say, Windows. And if you can't understand nVidia's position - e.g. maybe they really DO have some novel graphics processing pipeline in their software that provides them with a competitive speed advantage over the competition - then it's worth keeping it obscured. That's capitalism. (Speculation: some of their binary code dynamically optimizes an FPGA on board for better performance.) You can be damned sure that if I suddenly managed to come up with a novel algorithm for faster database transactions that I'd keep it secret, too, and then sell the hell out of it in competition with Oracle and DB2. Again, that's not bad, that's competition.
Don't get me wrong, I doubt that 95% of the code that is closed is actually worth closing. It really might be that last 5% scattered everywhere that warrants keeping it closed.
Both Intel and AMD own their own respective graphics chipset. Intel, AFAIK, developed their own integrated graphics chipset, mostly, and AMD purchased ATI.
Both Intel and AMD support the free software community far better than Nvidia. Both Intel and AMD are racing to integrate video graphics into their respective CPUs. With the graphics chip integrated into the CPU, Nvidia gets locked out.
Nvidia's only remaining market niche, as I see, is extremely high end graphics. Intel's and AMD's graphic offering, at the moment, lag Nvidia's, somewhat. Someone who needs all the rendering power they could get would not have Linux support as a major bullet point, as I see. They'll be quite content to using Nvidia's drivers on either Windows or Linux, depending on their software, with Nvidia's nature as a binary blob under Linux being of little concern. That's the only market niche I see remaining for Nvidia. Both AMD's and Intel's product lines, although not as powerful as Nvidia's, are perfectly fine for the average user and/or gamer. With out of the box support in current Linux distros for Intel's hardware (mostly already the case today), or AMD's hardware (eh, maybe tomorrow), Nvidia's outlook there is not too bright.
No, Windows is better value. You get 6x as much driver for your money.
I think you have it wrong and I'm writing this at Sony Pictures Imageworks on a CentOS box.
The film industry is mainly Windows and Linux, the larger the facility the higher the chance of it being a Linux house, but not always.
You hear "Macs make movies" so often and if anyone who doesn't work in the industry could see the state of things they would find the quote funny.
The main users of Apple products are producers and other pencil pushers running around with iPhones and Mac Pros, video files passed around during production are usually QuickTime files. Other than that a very limited amount of the business is anything Apple related. Final Cut is popular however its only one tool in the whole production chain and a facility doesn't need to equip everyone with a Mac just because its used. It is not uncommon to see a few Macs around facilities however you do not seem them in numbers.
I have only visited one all Mac based facility and even then they had RHEL dual booting macs. I can probably count on both hands how many visual effects studios I've seen or heard of that are all Mac based. Linux and Windows are no doubt the prominent players in the visual effects field. Linux isn't just on the backend either, plenty of facilities run Linux on the desktop and any one day there are thousands of artists typing grep and ls in a terminal somewhere. Its not just the bigger facilities either, plenty of smaller shops run Linux all around. If a facility isn't running Linux it most likely is running Windows.
Avids are used in editorial nothing more, so you do not see them in numbers. The Autodesk offerings have moved off Irix and are now HP/IBM Linux workstations.
Nvidia has the DCC market cornered with the Quadro line, I'm not going to get into the debate of whether they are wroth the price or not though. Even if a facility doesn't use Quadros in mass you can almost be certain the workstations have some sort of Nvidia card installed. Most applications in DCC are OpenGL based, since Nvidia has a track record of having a better OpenGL product, its not hard to understand why they might have a strong hold on the DCC industry.
Is that you get people who've toyed with writing a driver for something simple, and get lulled in to thinking that means that all drivers are not a huge deal. Problem is that's not the case. Something like a basic SATA controller really doesn't have a whole lot in the way of functionality for you to implement to get a driver up and working. You can see this in terms of downloadable driver sizes too. Take a look at something like the MegaRAID cards from LSI. The actual driver is all of 25k.
Well that's not the case with graphics cards. They are extremely complex beasts, and getting more complex all the time. You are working to implement a very complex API (OpenGL). As such the driver is going to be much more complex. You can again see this in terms of driver sizes. The core nVidia driver for my 7950 here at work is 16MB. That's just the main driver file, there are other support files it needs to work, and then more files on top of that to really give you all the functions you want (like the custom control panel and such).
So it is a much harder job. It is also a continually moving target. As of this month, we now have a new generation of graphics hardware out that has major differences. The DirectX 11 gen hardware (Radeon 5000 series) is quite different from the previous gen in terms of what it can do. As such the drivers are going to be different. It isn't a case of "Just update the old drivers for the new hardware." It is writing drivers to support a whole new set of features.
Thus I think you get people who have this "Oh it isn't so hard," idea because they've played with the simple stuff. Ya well, sorry guys this isn't simple. In fact, I'd wager graphics drivers are the most complex drivers on systems these days.
As such I can see why nVidia isn't impressed. It isn't a case of "Just give us the docs and we'll knock out a dynamite driver in a week." They might like to pretend that is how it'll be but it's not.