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NVidia releasing OpenGL ICD by End of Year

Posted by Hemos on from the mo-better-graphics-comin-at-ya dept.

ttyRazor writes "ga-source.com is reporting that at Comdex they were told by NVidia that they will be releasing an OpenGL ICD for Linux for all their current products by the end of the year. Woohoo! Quake 3 on my TNT in Linux! One less reason to dual boot. " Mmmm...prettier graphics. I'll give thanks for that.

2 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Why Nvidia is doing this... by rogerbo · · Score: 4

    I think I know why Nvidia is doing this and it ain't nothing to do with games or wanting to be nice to the open source community.

    Nvidia and SGI are scheming behind the curtains to create NT killer 3d workstations that are Intel Linux based and will have either Quadro's or most likely some kind of multi-pipe (2-4 quadro's) in parallel and custom bus architecture (like the current SGI vis workstations).

    Cue a release of Maya for Linux soon (it's done they're just waiting for the linux 3d hardware support to catch up...)

    A broad release to the linux community gets their driver's throughly beta tested before the release of their custom boxes probably about march next year.

    Unfortunately then I don't think they will opensource the drivers. It will probably be an open source resource manager (basic interface) and binary only glx module for XF86 4.0. If I understand the XF86 4.0 architecture correctly it's possible to have binary only modules that link into the X server and well at least we don't have the problem of kernel modules compiled for wrong kernel versions anymore.

    Then once SGI get's a few more features in Linux (Raw i/o, XFS, realtime uncompressed video streaming) look for come seriously cool linux based video editing/compositing systems....

    The next year will be interesting....

  2. Re:Pardon me, but by mvw · · Score: 3
    My TNT2 Ultra has worked nicely for some months now (since this summer), thank you very much. There's a fully open source (GPL iirc) driver built around Mesa and SGI's GLX.

    Nope, the glx that is out and works with nvidia cards (and even better with Matrox ones) is not the SGI one but an open effort - albeit a prominent team member is a SGI employee.

    However the upcoming DRI stuff for XFree86 4 is based on a newer glx implementation (we are talking OpenGL over X protocol now) by SGI. At present it is expected that only the hardware driver stuff of the openproject.net glx will make it into XF4 - but who knows.