Posted by
Hemos
on from the games-are-going-look-nicer dept.
Quite a number of you wrote in with the news that Nvidia has released the drivers for all of their chipsets, TNT2 included. The drivers are X and OpenGL, and are availible under the XFree86 license. To get the stuff, head over here.
Dynamics of Moderation 101
by
Skip666Kent
·
· Score: 2
Attention class. Quiet down please. Joey, give Sally her blouse back and sit down.
Good. Now:
You may be under the impression that moderation happens sequentially, as in "He's only been moderated to 4? That's not enough! I'll moderate him to FIVE!" I'm sure that's true at times, but I'll wager that in most cases, a number of folks moderate posts more or less at once. This happens in both directions. An only mildly retarded post may get wailed down to -1 if it's posted near the beginning of the overall thread, while a mildly intelligent post will top the charts at number 5.
The Reason for this is simple: when there's fewer posts for moderators to choose from, more moderator's will moderate the same posts, hence the effects of moderation will be exaggerated.
What's the Cure? They're the guys that wrote "Primary", which is an amazing song, but of no concern to us here. In terms of a cure for A Lack of Temperance in Moderation, I don't think we need one. It just doesn't matter. The system work Pretty Darn Well as it is, and that's a LOT better than Really Bad!
If one were to impart a Fix, I think it would be along the lines of an algorhythm of sorts (no pun intended) which would cause the Strength of a single Act of Moderation (up or down) to vary in relation to the number of posts overall. It would no longer always be "one man, one vote". I must reassert, however, that I think this would be a cosmic waste of time.
In other words...
STOP WHINING!
;^D
cheerz, -kent
-- **>>BELCH
$$$$$$$
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2
I think that NVidia just sold a hellofalotta TNT2's.
Well... at least one...;P
Phenym
Re:Running something like Quake2
by
mistshadow
·
· Score: 2
There's two parts to their OpenGl support under X. One part gets loaded into the server as a module, the other part is a shared library that gets loaded into the application. The shared library then communicates with the X server to get things done.
Heh, acutaly 3dfx drivers suck on windows to. they *Still* don't have a full working ICD, and there users are having tons of trouble getting the q3a test to work. to top it off. They've been trying to get people to write games in glide, by making terrible OGL and even d3d drivers, and now its backfiring. --------------- Chad Okere
status of nvidia with debian's x
by
Adam+Heath
·
· Score: 2
The XFree86 maintainer for debian, Branden Robinson, builds X on my box. On occasion, I have helped him out with different parts of the system, and I have designed the current debian side of the build system(automatic applying of patches).
The nvidia patch is waiting in the queue. The so called vmware patch been in potato's X since -4.
Also note this news fro XFree86
by
Jeffrey+Baker
·
· Score: 4
This is wonderful news that a first rate hardware vendor has open-sourced the drivers for their flagship product. No drivers for BeOS and other plaforms will spring up soon.
A related piece of good news for the Linux 3D community is the news from XFree86 that a pre-4.0 build will be available in July 1999. Check it out over at xfree86.org.
-jwb
Re:Also note this news fro XFree86
by
Caballero
·
· Score: 3
XF4.0 will include our (Precision Insight) direct rendering infrastructure. One of the important issues for good 3D performance is getting a fast path to the hardware. Direct rendering provides that structure.
When the FAQ says that the performance isn't great, it is because they have to use GLX and go through the X server to do their 3D rendering. There's some significant work to connect up a new driver to the DRI, but the nVidia drivers appear to be well suited to the PI DRI.
Once that's done the performance will improve. Beyond that there's undoubtedly other optimizations that will be needed, but it'll be a great start.
People seem to be worried about in a window rendering versus full screen. That's really a non issue. It is true that GLX implies rendering is in a window, but if the window is the same size as the screen, then there isn't really a difference. It should be possible for the driver to detect this case and do page flipping instead of copying and get the performance improvement.
- |Daryll
Re:Are you listening, Creative Technologies?
by
Signal+11
·
· Score: 2
Doomy, you'll probably never read this, as there have been a dozen new stories posted.. but I don't believe Bruce's post was worthy of a 5 rating. It was Bruce that posted it, that's why he got a 5. If I had posted it.. it might have gotten as high as a 2. It was off topic. End of story.
And if I really wanted to "take stabs at bruce", as you've so subtly put it, I'd attack him for being childish about the open source trademarking infighting between him and ESR. Okay? There's plenty of flame bait to go around.
I'd also like to point out that contrary to all the flak I've taken in this thread.. it isn't dead for a reason. Let that eat away at you for abit, 'cuz like it or not people it's the truth.
I'm going to have to do a reality-check and see who else feels the way you do... but not here on Slashdot, please, folks. If you have to, email me at bruce@va.debian.org .
About the AGP: that's Intel's fault, not nVidia's. Intel won't release the specs for the GART interface on their chipsets. The other chipset manufacturers will, but that's just for Super7 chipsets, which is a minority of the market, making it more difficult to get something working.
If the frame rates on this thing are in the ballpark with the Voodoo 3 3000 (and last I heard they weren't much slower, even with 32 bit rendering on), I'm getting one. I'm worried about performance on my K6II, though - all the benchmarks I've seen show 3dfx cards performing almost evenly with Celerons at the same clock speed, while TNT/TNT2 performance falls off dramatically.
I know a couple other people whose only gripe with the TNT2 was the lack of Linux support - I expect their minds are made up solidly now.
Are you listening, Creative Technologies?
by
Bruce+Perens
·
· Score: 5
Creative is an OEM of Nvidia chip sets. Creative, nothing in your sound cards can possibly be as proprietary as Nvidia's 3D chip. Let's please have real Open Source drivers for all of your sound cards, and hardware documentation on the web. Lead the pack, don't be a reluctant follower.
Re:What are the framerates like?!
by
kijiki
·
· Score: 2
Just my preliminary/timerefresh immediatly after starting the first board (yeah yeah, lame I know): 800x600 with all visual options on: 27FPS.
keep in mind, it is VERY unoptimized, the two worst offender is that all rendering happening in the Xserver's context, which means all that data has to be pumped through a pipe! No AGP texturing doesn't help either. Now for a 100% unscientific "test" morph3d screensaver looks about 4 times faster under linux with this driver than under windows with nvidia's detonator drivers (no textures to stuff through the pipe). I can hardly wait till Precision Insight works their magic.
All in all, a very solid alpha driver, works great (except for q3test) and speed will only improve with time.
This will give them a strategic advantage over 3dfx - the TNT drivers will be preferred over 3dfx on linux, which means nVidia will have a larger share of the market on linux.
3dfx should realize this, and if they're smart, the rest of the industry will shortly follow suit, and we'll have open sourced drivers for most (all?) 3D products. My hats are off to them for creating an excellent product, and for letting us tinker with it. I'm sure this will only accellerate 3D uses with linux (GAMES!) and it's acceptance into mainstream.
I'm sure that requests from the Linux community had a lot to do with the release of these drivers, but give them some credit - they've been working on these for more than 2 weeks. Read the FAQ - Dave said there are 10 man YEARS in the windows version of the drivers. These things don't fall together overnight. Linux users can get pretty impatient while they wait for hardware support, but it's important to refrain from shouting "(hardware vendor here) SUCKS!" if you mail them and you don't have drivers within 2 weeks.
NVIDIA did a good thing here - if you mailed them requesting the drivers, make sure you mail them and let them know how much you support their action.
This is slashdot. People have the right to express their opinions. And it is common courtesy not condem people for doing that.
Apparently the people reading this thread are evenly split on the issue, if the fluxuations in the original post's score is any indicator. It's a grey area in the moderator guidelines, and it's obviously been unearthed in this thread. I'll e-mail cmdr taco about this... hopefully we'll have the boundaries for "on topic" and "off topic" more clearly defined.
When _you_ develop and release software, _you_ can choose the packaging format.
Don't bitch about someone else's choice, especially when they are giving their work away for free. You should be grateful that someone has done it at all.
Hey, don't get TOO excited. The drivers aren't 100% optimized (and no AGP texturing...boo) so, according to the FAQ, you can't run Quake3 with them although Quake2 should work fun. Still, it's a good start, and hopefully when (if) XFree84 4 comes out, I'll be able to play Q3 with a TNT2...yum.
doozy
Re:go away Crow
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2
...if people werent so stupid I wouldnt have to be though.
Blasting stupid people is an exercise in futility; chill out and enjoy life, instead of alienating people from your project.
Besides, most people aren't stupid, they're just ignorant, as we all are in one area or another.
> When one hardware manufacturer makes a brave decision, I think it's fair to nudge another hardware manufacturer, pointing and saying "see!".
Yes, but this is a public forum. What's worse, there are many hundreds of comments posted each day. When people click on the [comments] button, they want to read more about that topic. In this case, it's nVidia o-sourcing their drivers, not creative's lack of doing so. I think it's inappropriate to get up on the soapbox to point that out.. and it's also an ambush: Creative employees wouldn't likely be reading this thread. If you want to send those hw manufacturers a message - send it right to the CTO and cc it to marketing. Better yet, print it out, and snail-mail it to Creative's corporate HQ.
Sure, I have a soapbox and I am rarely off of it. Somehow, by some incredible miracle, big companies are listening. I wish I could tell you about the mega-corporations I've been working with on free software licensing this week. You'll find out eventually.
If your posts to license-discuss are any indicator.. I suspected as much. Post something to slashdot about it when you have something. I look forward to reading it. And that post would probably be an appropriate forum to mention which companies aren't "with it". Maybe throwing up a list at opensource.org of a "what's happening" nature would be a Good Thing too.
I think I'm still doing the community some good. I hope you don't mind too much if I continue.
Your contributions have been enormous. Of course, your mistakes have been equally monumental!:) Go right on fighting. Contrary to what many slashdotters may think, the odds are still very much against us. We can use all the help we can get.
--
Great news for ALL owners of 3D cards
by
kijiki
·
· Score: 2
This is great for any linux user who has a 3D card. 3dfx released binary only drivers, Matrox witholds information for programming the triangle setup engine (WARP). The consumer 3D market is so competitive, now that Nvidia has done it, the others will be forced to follow suit, so they are not percieved as having inferior linux support. Its good to see that the linux "market" has grown to the point that companies are writing drivers themselves. Here's to a open sourced linux driver on every hardware vendor's web page!
It doesn't seem to run quake3 for me yet, but quake2 runs and looks great (still a little slow, hopefully Precision Insight will come through for us soon). The kicker? you HAVE to see sproingies at 1600x1200 flying by! Running quake2 and sproingies both in a window and getting good framerate out of both is cool too.
Slashdot Mirror
Attention class. Quiet down please. Joey, give Sally her blouse back and sit down.
Good. Now:
You may be under the impression that moderation happens sequentially, as in "He's only been moderated to 4? That's not enough! I'll moderate him to FIVE!" I'm sure that's true at times, but I'll wager that in most cases, a number of folks moderate posts more or less at once. This happens in both directions. An only mildly retarded post may get wailed down to -1 if it's posted near the beginning of the overall thread, while a mildly intelligent post will top the charts at number 5.
The Reason for this is simple: when there's fewer posts for moderators to choose from, more moderator's will moderate the same posts, hence the effects of moderation will be exaggerated.
What's the Cure? They're the guys that wrote "Primary", which is an amazing song, but of no concern to us here. In terms of a cure for A Lack of Temperance in Moderation, I don't think we need one. It just doesn't matter. The system work Pretty Darn Well as it is, and that's a LOT better than Really Bad!
If one were to impart a Fix, I think it would be along the lines of an algorhythm of sorts (no pun intended) which would cause the Strength of a single Act of Moderation (up or down) to vary in relation to the number of posts overall. It would no longer always be "one man, one vote".
I must reassert, however, that I think this would be a cosmic waste of time.
In other words...
STOP WHINING!
;^D
cheerz,
-kent
**>>BELCH
I think that NVidia just sold a hellofalotta TNT2's.
;P
Well... at least one...
Phenym
There's two parts to their OpenGl support under X. One part gets loaded into the server as a module, the other part is a shared library that gets loaded into the application. The shared library then communicates with the X server to get things done.
Heh, acutaly 3dfx drivers suck on windows to. they *Still* don't have a full working ICD, and there users are having tons of trouble getting the q3a test to work. to top it off. They've been trying to get people to write games in glide, by making terrible OGL and even d3d drivers, and now its backfiring.
---------------
Chad Okere
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The XFree86 maintainer for debian, Branden Robinson, builds X on my box. On occasion, I have helped him out with different parts of the system, and I have designed the current debian side of the build system(automatic applying of patches).
The nvidia patch is waiting in the queue. The so called vmware patch been in potato's X since -4.
A related piece of good news for the Linux 3D community is the news from XFree86 that a pre-4.0 build will be available in July 1999. Check it out over at xfree86.org.
-jwb
Doomy, you'll probably never read this, as there have been a dozen new stories posted.. but I don't believe Bruce's post was worthy of a 5 rating. It was Bruce that posted it, that's why he got a 5. If I had posted it.. it might have gotten as high as a 2. It was off topic. End of story.
And if I really wanted to "take stabs at bruce", as you've so subtly put it, I'd attack him for being childish about the open source trademarking infighting between him and ESR. Okay? There's plenty of flame bait to go around.
I'd also like to point out that contrary to all the flak I've taken in this thread.. it isn't dead for a reason. Let that eat away at you for abit, 'cuz like it or not people it's the truth.
--
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
About the AGP: that's Intel's fault, not nVidia's. Intel won't release the specs for the GART interface on their chipsets. The other chipset manufacturers will, but that's just for Super7 chipsets, which is a minority of the market, making it more difficult to get something working.
If the frame rates on this thing are in the ballpark with the Voodoo 3 3000 (and last I heard they weren't much slower, even with 32 bit rendering on), I'm getting one. I'm worried about performance on my K6II, though - all the benchmarks I've seen show 3dfx cards performing almost evenly with Celerons at the same clock speed, while TNT/TNT2 performance falls off dramatically.
I know a couple other people whose only gripe with the TNT2 was the lack of Linux support - I expect their minds are made up solidly now.
Thanks
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens.
Just my preliminary /timerefresh immediatly after starting the first board (yeah yeah, lame I know):
800x600 with all visual options on: 27FPS.
keep in mind, it is VERY unoptimized, the two worst offender is that all rendering happening in the Xserver's context, which means all that data has to be pumped through a pipe! No AGP texturing doesn't help either. Now for a 100% unscientific "test" morph3d screensaver looks about 4 times faster under linux with this driver than under windows with nvidia's detonator drivers (no textures to stuff through the pipe). I can hardly wait till Precision Insight works their magic.
All in all, a very solid alpha driver, works great (except for q3test) and speed will only improve with time.
Hopefully this will be a good example for other hardware vendors.
We're moving rapidly towards making Linux into a good 3D workstation!
- |Daryll
This will give them a strategic advantage over 3dfx - the TNT drivers will be preferred over 3dfx on linux, which means nVidia will have a larger share of the market on linux.
3dfx should realize this, and if they're smart, the rest of the industry will shortly follow suit, and we'll have open sourced drivers for most (all?) 3D products. My hats are off to them for creating an excellent product, and for letting us tinker with it. I'm sure this will only accellerate 3D uses with linux (GAMES!) and it's acceptance into mainstream.
Thanks guys!!
--
I'm sure that requests from the Linux community had a lot to do with the release of these drivers, but give them some credit - they've been working on these for more than 2 weeks. Read the FAQ - Dave said there are 10 man YEARS in the windows version of the drivers. These things don't fall together overnight. Linux users can get pretty impatient while they wait for hardware support, but it's important to refrain from shouting "(hardware vendor here) SUCKS!" if you mail them and you don't have drivers within 2 weeks.
NVIDIA did a good thing here - if you mailed them requesting the drivers, make sure you mail them and let them know how much you support their action.
This is slashdot. People have the right to express their opinions. And it is common courtesy not condem people for doing that.
Apparently the people reading this thread are evenly split on the issue, if the fluxuations in the original post's score is any indicator. It's a grey area in the moderator guidelines, and it's obviously been unearthed in this thread. I'll e-mail cmdr taco about this... hopefully we'll have the boundaries for "on topic" and "off topic" more clearly defined.
--
When _you_ develop and release software, _you_ can choose the packaging format.
Don't bitch about someone else's choice, especially when they are giving their work away for free. You should be grateful that someone has done it at all.
Hey, don't get TOO excited. The drivers aren't 100% optimized (and no AGP texturing...boo) so, according to the FAQ, you can't run Quake3 with them although Quake2 should work fun. Still, it's a good start, and hopefully when (if) XFree84 4 comes out, I'll be able to play Q3 with a TNT2...yum.
doozy
Blasting stupid people is an exercise in futility; chill out and enjoy life, instead of alienating people from your project.
Besides, most people aren't stupid, they're just ignorant, as we all are in one area or another.
The older RIVA and RIVA ZX cards were limited to 16bpp in order to get 3d acceleration(same as the Voodoo).
Now there may be driver issues that limit TNT and TNT2, but I do know that Windows drivers for TNT and TNT2 support 32bpp acceleration...
I guess you have to wait for a response from a Linux TNT user...
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
> When one hardware manufacturer makes a brave decision, I think it's fair to nudge another hardware manufacturer, pointing and saying "see!".
:) Go right on fighting. Contrary to what many slashdotters may think, the odds are still very much against us. We can use all the help we can get.
Yes, but this is a public forum. What's worse, there are many hundreds of comments posted each day. When people click on the [comments] button, they want to read more about that topic. In this case, it's nVidia o-sourcing their drivers, not creative's lack of doing so. I think it's inappropriate to get up on the soapbox to point that out.. and it's also an ambush: Creative employees wouldn't likely be reading this thread. If you want to send those hw manufacturers a message - send it right to the CTO and cc it to marketing. Better yet, print it out, and snail-mail it to Creative's corporate HQ.
Sure, I have a soapbox and I am rarely off of it. Somehow, by some incredible miracle, big companies are listening. I wish I could tell you about the mega-corporations I've been working with on free software licensing this week. You'll find out eventually.
If your posts to license-discuss are any indicator.. I suspected as much. Post something to slashdot about it when you have something. I look forward to reading it. And that post would probably be an appropriate forum to mention which companies aren't "with it". Maybe throwing up a list at opensource.org of a "what's happening" nature would be a Good Thing too.
I think I'm still doing the community some good. I hope you don't mind too much if I continue.
Your contributions have been enormous. Of course, your mistakes have been equally monumental!
--
This is great for any linux user who has a 3D card. 3dfx released binary only drivers, Matrox witholds information for programming the triangle setup engine (WARP). The consumer 3D market is so competitive, now that Nvidia has done it, the others will be forced to follow suit, so they are not percieved as having inferior linux support.
Its good to see that the linux "market" has grown to the point that companies are writing drivers themselves. Here's to a open sourced linux driver on every hardware vendor's web page!
It doesn't seem to run quake3 for me yet, but quake2 runs and looks great (still a little slow, hopefully Precision Insight will come through for us soon). The kicker? you HAVE to see sproingies at 1600x1200 flying by! Running quake2 and sproingies both in a window and getting good framerate out of both is cool too.