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Open Source 3D Nvidia Driver Is Ready For Fedora 13
An anonymous reader writes "Red Hat has already been using the Nouveau X.Org driver in Fedora for providing display and 2D support, but with their next release (Fedora 13) they will be making open-source 3D acceleration readily available to those using Nvidia graphics cards. Red Hat has packaged the Nouveau 3D driver in Fedora 13 and what makes it interesting — besides being an open source 3D driver that was written by the community by reverse engineering Nvidia's closed-source driver — is that it's one of the first drivers to use the Gallium3D driver interface. Phoronix has tested out this Gallium3D driver for Nvidia GPUs in a Fedora 13 daily build and found it to run with a variety of OpenGL games, with benchmarks being included that compare it to Nvidia's official driver. The performance is far from being on the same stage as Nvidia's official Unix driver."
Copy the Ethernet driver code, and use it as a base.
Seriously, that's what the folks told me before I wrote a device driver for an ATM network adapter.
Don't even look at the Token Ring driver code, I was told.
I could imagine the same holds for writing graphics card device drivers.
That glass of Sake, and a talk from your manager about the Divine Wind will be all that you need to set off about your task.
Oh, and the headband with the red dot.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Excuse me for not being an expert on drivers for hardware I don't own,
You're excused.
but does this mean the new driver is better than the official driver, or not nearly as good?
It's not new, it's been around for a while. But it's not nearly as good in most respects; no VDPAU, poor performance.
If it is not "on the same stage," meaning not nearly as good, why is Red Hat using it,
Because it is freely redistributable.
and why is this news?
Because it just happened.
Do some people really use markedly inferior software simply because it is open source, even if a better competitor is available at no cost?
No, some people use markedly inferior software simply because it is Free Software, which is totally and completely different (The OSI's attempts to convince you to the contrary notwithstanding.)
This seems silly to me.
Nobody cares.
I use linux because it works perfectly well for me.
Me too. But nobody cares why either of us use Linux. Well, that's not true. I've put some people on to it. Nobody cares why you use Linux.
If it were a pile of crap in comparison to Windows, I'd use Windows
In many respects, it is, for example if you are a gamer.
even though I have a casual dislike for Microsoft.
So you're wearing slacks?
(please no Macintosh osx comments here, I don't care)
Nobody cares if you care, didn't we cover that?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"