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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.
Or just use an OS that actually works with modern hardware
Or just use hardware that works with a modern OS.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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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.