Free Software NVIDIA Driver Now Supports 3D Acceleration With All GeForce GPUs

aloniv writes "The reverse-engineered free/libre and open source driver for NVIDIA cards Nouveau has reached another milestone. 'The Nouveau driver in the current Linux 3.8 development branch has recently acquired everything that's necessary to support the 3D acceleration features of any GeForce graphics hardware. Together with a current version of libdrm and the Nouveau 3D driver in Mesa 3D 9.0, this allows Linux applications to use 3D acceleration even with the most recent GeForce graphics cards."

Comments

Re:Why do drivers need to be free?

[Skinkie]

Its quite simple. I have a very nice Mac Snowball. Updates for OSX PowerPC are not flying in anymore, even Safari crashes on Google.com. So it is a good time to switch to a better maintained operation system. For PowerPC there are not many choices, but lets pick Linux. The motherboard has an onboard NV04, if this was an x86 I might be able to use the nvidia legacy drivers, for PowerPC: architecture not supported. So why is open source important: it can be compiled on your architecture of choice and gives proper hardware a few extra years (see below: "Great news for ARM"). Another interesting thing is that improvements won't limit themselves to the latest, greatest (and most expensive) flagship.