Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
The nouveau driver supports everything from NV04 upwards - NV01 and NV03 (NV02 never made it to production) are very different. In particular, PFIFO (the engine on the card that submits command the GPU) on NV01 doesn't support DMA at all, and NV03 has broken DMA. For that (and other) reasons, if support were desired for these cards, it would be in a separate driver. However such a driver would essentially be of academic interest, since these cards only accelerate simple shapes (like triangles and curves).
That having been said, one of the nouveau developers has done some reverse engineering of the NV01, the finiding of whic hare in the envytools notes.
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.
Fat chance.
I've got all sorts of older Nvidia hardware that works great with the Nvidia blob and that has never worked with Nouveau.
It's a particular pain in the arse because it's loaded automatically as if it really were a real stable driver during installation these days and it is used to drive the console. Combined with the current trend for 'live-install' discs many modern distro's are nearly impossible to install on older hardware. Ubuntu, I'm looking at you.
Sure there are ways around it but they are far from beginner friendly, at which point why the hell are you bothering with a distro like Ubuntu, you might as well be installing Gentoo.
It's frustrating to watch old, dull stuff that works being deprecated for new flashy shit that doesn't.
Trust The Computer, The Computer is your friend.
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."
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?
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.
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