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

Posted by Soulskill on from the can-now-outmaneuver-Khan dept.

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."

19 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Good News by houstonbofh · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Now people can stop bitching about how "free" a driver is and just concentrate on how well it works.

    1. Re:Good News by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      My happy is that now the kernel team can see how the free driver works, and I don't have to patch NVIDIA's driver (eg: with 3.8.0-rc2 --the current beta kernel-- and likewise 3.8.0-rc1 --last weeks beta kernel--) I had to patch the current NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-310.19 drivers by changing a few lines so that it would build. It tanked on the newest kernels. NVIDIA does a good job with stable kernels (although they sometimes delay getting drivers out for recent stable kernels by a few days to a week or more), but now I can use Nouveau's driver to look at accelerated video (not just games but HD TV too).

    2. Re:Good News by ghetto2ivy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Now people can stop bitching about how "free" a driver is and just concentrate on how well it works.

      Or just use an OS that actually works with modern hardware

      Or just use hardware that works with a modern OS.

    3. Re:Good News by VortexCortex · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Now people can stop bitching about how "free" a driver is and just concentrate on how well it works.

      Or just use an OS that actually works with modern hardware

      Or just buy hardware from manufacturers that release open source drivers, so your OS choice isn't limited by your hardware choices.

    4. Re:Good News by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Interesting
      OK, here are the limitations:

      decent fan control support is still in preparation and will initially only cover older GeForce chips......Furthermore, the driver can't switch between the various graphics chip and memory speeds with many current cards and often causes the graphics hardware to run at the slowest operating speed – the 3D performance that is achievable this way is usually sufficient for 3D composited desktops such as Unity or the Gnome shell but stays well behind what NVIDIA's proprietary driver can tickle out of the same graphics hardware.

      So that's how it is. Still good to see progress.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    5. Re:Good News by dreamchaser · · Score: 5, Informative

      Too bad what is to be the next Debian Stable has already long been frozen... major, groundbreaking improvements always seem to be implemented at a time that guarantees waiting through an entire release and then some.

      How does that stop you from installing it? It doesn't. Just because it won't be prepackaged in your favorite distro doesn't mean you can't use it.

    6. Re:Good News by Bill+Currie · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Of course most of us don't have the knowledge, but if we're motivated enough, we can obtain that knowledge. Worst case, we go to someone who does have the knowledge and say "here's $X, fix it". With closed drivers, none of that is even possible. You need $X**N to get noticed by most closed sources.

      --

      Bill - aka taniwha
      --
      Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak

    7. Re:Good News by Bert64 · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's a choice between having a single source who can fix bugs, or a significantly larger pool of people who are capable of fixing those bugs. Employees of a single company are beholden to the business goals of that company, goals which are highly likely to differ from your needs as a user.

      In short, if the source is open you have a much bigger chance that someone will be both willing and able to fix the bug thats causing you problems, or that you could entice someone to do so if it really matters to you.

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    8. Re:Good News by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's a choice between having a single source who can fix bugs, or a significantly larger pool of people who are capable of fixing those bugs. Employees of a single company are beholden to the business goals of that company, goals which are highly likely to differ from your needs as a user.

      Err, why are my needs likely to differ greatly with the goals of the company? If I buy a product from a company, I'd say the chances are good that my needs jive with their goals. Especially in this case: Nvidia exists to make money, they make money by creating a product people want, and drivers that aren't buggy make their products more valuable. I'd say Nvidia inherently has a much better motivation to fix bugs in their drivers than a couple hundred random people scattered throughout the world.

      I'm not arguing that open source isn't good, only that it should be the least of our concerns if we're evaluating driver quality. If Nvidia's own drivers were open source, that would obviously be better than the current situation, but that doesn't mean that open source drivers are always better than proprietary drivers. Reality shows greater evidence than this theoretical discussion: I'm glad people are scratching their itches and working on Nouveau, but those drivers are simply not nearly as good as the proprietary drivers. Not yet. Not in any meaningful or non-religious way. Not by a long shot.

    9. Re:Good News by Karzz1 · · Score: 3, Informative

      It's a choice between having a single source who can fix bugs, or a significantly larger pool of people who are capable of fixing those bugs. Employees of a single company are beholden to the business goals of that company, goals which are highly likely to differ from your needs as a user.

      Err, why are my needs likely to differ greatly with the goals of the company? If I buy a product from a company, I'd say the chances are good that my needs jive with their goals.

      Sweet!!! I am going to go download the beta drivers for OSX to try out the new bug fixes.. oh, wait, I can't do that...
      Nevermind -- when are the chipset fixes coming out for the 780i/790i chipsets that cause SATA to act all funny under Linux? Any day now.. oh, wait, never..
      Well hell, I am going to go grab the BeOS drivers for my NVidia card so I can hack on that OS... oh wait... no such drivers...

      In the future, please don't assume that your needs cover everyone's needs.

      --
      Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
    10. Re:Good News by Ost99 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Nvidia wants to sell new cards. I want to keep my old one as long as possible.
      I've had buy a new card twice after support for my card was dropped from the binary driver.

      --
      ---- Sig. gone.
    11. Re:Good News by davydagger · · Score: 4, Informative

      There are many advantages of both the proprietary driver and noveau

      nouveau
      1. since its free software it can co-exist with other drivers, and lets x auto detect. your only option on live cds
      2. feature complete 2d and 3d rendering
      3. rock solid stable. Its actually more stable than the proprietary driver

      nvidia
      1. fast, perfomance comparable with other OSs
      2. closed source, doesn't play well with other drivers. But lets face it, if your playing video games, them too are closed source, and if your on a proper normal installed system, you don't need other video drivers.
      3. 100% feature complete, uses every last feature of the hardware as intented.
      4. supports OpenCL and vector programming.

    12. Re:Good News by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Err, why are my needs likely to differ greatly with the goals of the company? If I buy a product from a company, I'd say the chances are good that my needs jive with their goals. ...

      Sit back and let me tell you a little story.

      A few years ago, I bought a laptop, the first one I'd ever owned that had a 64-bit CPU. I set it up as a dual-boot system, with 64-bit versions of Windows XP Pro and whatever OpenSUSE that was current at the time (10.2 or 10.3, I'm guessing).

      There were no 64-bit Windows drivers for the wifi card. None.

      There were no binaries of 64-bit Linux drivers. But, there was source. While I took C++ in school way back when, and have worked with other people's code quite a lot in the last few years, I am in no way an expert coder. Nonetheless, it took me only about 20 minutes to figure out that I needed to change 1 line in one header file, and then I was only a configure; make && make install away from having a working wifi card.

      That model card is still being used in new laptops today, and there are still no 64-bit Windows drivers for it. Every one of those laptops is sold with 32-bit Windows, even if it has a 64-bt CPU.

      Meanwhile, the particular card discussed above is being used at this very moment to transmit this post from that very same laptop (running a 64-bit OS) to you.

      *fin*

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    13. Re:Good News by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 3, Insightful

      In the future, please don't assume you are even *remotely* representative of Slashdot's target reader. You don't matter, period.

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
  2. No thanks to NVIDIA though... Intel's better by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:No thanks to NVIDIA though... Intel's better by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Right now they're pretty much the only ones that don't support open source. Intel long ago opened things up, and AMD is opening up everything they can legally open. nVidia hasn't shown any evidence of opening up, even though right now that means that they're completely closed off.

      As much as I appreciate projects like Nouveau, it seems like the only way that nVidia will change it's mind is if people stop buying their products and go with AMD GPUs.

  3. Re:Even the GeForce 256? by salahx · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. VDPAU? by crow · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Is there any support for media playback acceleration? That's the one thing keeping me with the nVidia driver for my MythTV system.

  5. Great news for ARM by crow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.