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NVidia releases Linux drivers for X and GL

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.

4 of 271 comments (clear)

  1. 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

    1. 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

  2. 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.

    Thanks

    Bruce Perens

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  3. Excellent move nVidia! by Caballero · · Score: 4
    Dave Schmenk of nVidia deserves a lot of credit for pulling this off.

    Hopefully this will be a good example for other hardware vendors.

    We're moving rapidly towards making Linux into a good 3D workstation!

    - |Daryll