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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."
Now people can stop bitching about how "free" a driver is and just concentrate on how well it works.
Anything beyond bumblebee and primus?
I'd never buy a system with NVIDIA graphics even though I support the nouveau projects efforts. The problem is NVIDIA doesn't cooperate with the nouveau project and has provided little to no support for it. I'm not going the ATI path though. AMD just pulls the cloth over your eyes to what is really going on. Good PR is not good enough for this user. AMD doesn't provide sufficient documentation to produce a completely free solution.
Which means that right now Intel's graphics (except for the PowerVR based stuff which is actually third party) are the only good option. And before you go on about what crap Intel's graphics are they have significantly improved from years past and have some of the best support. The Intel drivers even support features the proprietary graphics drivers are lacking from NVIDIA/ATI. So depending on what you really care about Intel's the best bet. The game developers are even tailing to the code because they can (since the drivers are completely free) which has produced a significant boost in performance for some games.
Or just use hardware that works with a modern OS.
That would make switching from your current OS to a modern OS far more expensive.
Even the TNT2? TNT? Vanta? RIVA128? NV1?
NVIDIA provides binary with the latest features and works great.
Not all platforms treat graphics drivers as user-installable packages. For example, good luck extracting this binary from a particular version of Android in order to use it with an AOSP build for a given device.
I could care less the heritage of a piece of software, as long as it functions correctly. Im a big fan of using the best tool for the job
Until what used to be the best tool for the job suddenly becomes unusable. If, for example, you have found the best tool for the job to be Windows XP, that'll more likely than not become vulnerable to remote exploits by the end of April 2014, soon after Microsoft pushes out the final Patch Tuesday for that platform. A user of free software, on the other hand, is free to hire anybody to continue maintaining the best tool for the job.
Do MS, the BSD's or Apple have OS drivers?
What about the firmware in your computer's parts, you don't accept that either?
I see proprietary video drivers just like firmware, part of the package.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Firmware runs on the device itself, and is generally OS independent.
Drivers run on the OS, and therefore require you to be running a specific OS and a specific version of that OS. If a third party is maintaining the drivers, and does not provide you with sourcecode then you have no guarantee that they will continue updating it to work with new OS versions, or fix bugs.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Let me start by saying this is good news. I don't have an Nvidia card, but I like to have the option of getting one and have it be supported by Free software.
Having said that, the article is light on details. How well do the features work? Does anything that works with the Free drivers for AMD or Intel now also work with Nvidia? How does the feature set compare with the closed-source Nvidia driver? How does performance compare?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The reason these FOSS drivers are crap is because NVIDIA doesn't cooperate and it requires significant resources to reverse engineer. If you asked me I'd say the NVIDIA cards are defective. They simply don't work without a bunch of fiddling around. That's not how Linux and free software systems work and if your not going to cooperate than why bother? If your going to give me Microsoft Windows I might as well use Microsoft Windows. I don't want that and I won't buy cards with NVIDIA chipsets. FOSS drivers are always the better choice when all other things are equal.
The blame isn't on Linux entirely. It's long past time we get past this sort of nonsense and focus on the real problems in computing. Having different types of incompatible drivers for every OS (and often different versions of the OS) is inexcusable.
If the OS vendors can't get their shit together, we need to find a way to package drivers directly into the firmware and bypass the OS entirely. Basically, we need what UEFI promised to deliver but didn't.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Well, with the GEM/KMS work on Intel progressing I'd guess FreeBSD support for Nouveau will also come within reach..
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
I doubt you'd want to use the 3D accel function of a TNT2 or GF256 card for any modern software. It'd bog like crazy unless you only had it do simple tasks, and Compiz wouldn't qualify as simple.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Is there any support for media playback acceleration? That's the one thing keeping me with the nVidia driver for my MythTV system.
This is likely to be perceived as trolling, but I'd honestly like to know: why are free 3D accelerator drivers so important? The OSS community has proven to be utterly incapable of developing or contributing to such projects in any meaningful capacity, so what's the point? The argument I frequently see is that this is the fault of the GPU manufacturers for not supporting OSS devs, but if said devs need their hand held every step of the way, what makes people think they can produce a worthwhile, production driver? What's wrong with a high quality propriety blob developed by experts that actually know what they're doing?
Bullshit.
If you use the Noveau driver then you are giving up VDPAU.
If you are building a media PC then why the HELL would you give up free BluRay decoding? Otherwise you need to use brute force via the CPU and you've left the domain of "leftover hardware".
An Nvidia card and the BLOB driver redeems hardware that would otherwise be a doorstop.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
One of the problems with the official binary driver is that it only supports x86. With an open source driver, there's no reason you can't use it on any architecture out there. There might be some people interested in PCI cards on PowerPC, but the big interest here is with ARM-based systems.
Your response pretty much demonstrates you have absolutely no clue what is being discussed. So anything you have to say on the matter is pretty meaningless.
Calling you a mindless troll would be charitable.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Steam.
Buanzo Consulting - 15 Years of GNU/Linux experience, for you.
I don't game. I do, however, dislike having to be "strategic" in my choice of drivers.
There's the "legacy driver" you can download which I use on a couple of old desktop machines in the office that have AGP Nvidia Geforce cards and one with a PCI card as well (actually newer than the AGP cards, but still getting on a bit). Changelogs show Nvidia still fix bugs in the "legacy driver" or make some sort of change every few months so it's not abandonware.
I suspect you've bought new cards the same reason the rest of us do - more shiny features or dying fans
Firmware is driver-dependant, and thus OS-dependant, architecture-dependant and version-dependant
It's worse than anything else - even hardware blobs can be run via emulators / virtual machines
My other
"I will put a cuddly baby penguin into a wood chipper every day until FreeBSD x11-drivers/xf86-video-nouveau catches up to Linux! ::evil laugh:: ... ::cry::"
Double that for the x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati.
I think a 64 MB Geforce256 would be sort of OK for Compiz, though any modern integrated video would run circles around it.
Annoyingly, Mint now uses nouveau by default. On all 3 of my nvidia-based PCs Noveau causes a hard lock up within a few seconds of the window manager starting up. One of my PCs has a GTX 580 another has a gt 520, and the 3rd is a laoptop with an older nvidia mbedded chipset, so I've given it a good range of GPU ages/levels to work on but it fails on all 3.
All problems go away immediately I replace nouveau with nvidia's binary blob driver.
Its even more of a bitch if you want to install Mint Debian because the installer locks up hard (before you can even get a shell up to uninstall nouveau). They've annoyingly also removed any non-graphical install options from the grub menu.
The net effect is you cant install Mint Debian on any nvida-based platform as there's no way to avoid nouveau getting started at boot and locking up the box well before the desktop runs.
I guess I could have hand-customised the installer ISO image to use nvidia instead of nouveau, then burnt another CD but I simply ran out of patience.