No, it's not just fine. I've bought 4 wireless optical scroll mice to try them out, and I returned all four. One major problem is that I can't comfortably rest all three fingers on the mouse - the mice are designed for two fingers. But the biggest problem for me was that if you accidentally scroll the scroll button during the click motion, you lose the click. Plus, there is a lot more down motion required for a middle click than a regular click. I've found them too frustrating to use, so I keep going back to an old 3 button.
I suspect that most of the people claiming that the two button wheel mice are 'just fine' have been using two button mice all along. If you're used to using a real three button mouse in a *NIX environment, it's difficult to switch. The three button mice are just better for most operations.
These mice are nice to use, but they're expensive, not ambidextrous, and they don't have a wireless version: http://www.contourdesign.com/pmo/
It depends on how close to the screen you are, and how large the screen is. I saw AOTC on a very large screen, and sat in the 4th row. I thought it looked like crap. The pixels were *very* obvious in a lot of scenes (the most memorable being a scene where there was a field of tall grass swaying in the breeze - pixelization galore). The color saturation of the image was quite good, though.
I have watched plenty of films in that same theater and never had any problems with the image (I saw Titanic in 70mm in that theater and it looked *awesome*). The problem is the pixel resolution of the current crop of projectors. They need to at least double (preferably quadruple) the resolution before I would go to see another digitally projected movie.
I can sort of see the argument here, but it basically ruins the point of having a standard interface like DirectX.
Not really. In the CPU world, you can optimize your application for i586, i686, athlon, etc. You can go the simple path and just add some compiler flags to your build, or you can write assembly code to take advantage of specific platform features.
Most games have assembly optimized code paths to squeeze out a few more frames per second already. And with Cg/HLSL, you can let the shader compiler make hardware specific optimizations for you.
If you don't mind "normal" performance, you can just write directly to standard Direct3D or OpenGL. If you want a few more frames per second, you add a custom code path. No big deal.
That's assuming "old-schooler" means a hardcore geek with tons of time on his hands, who is willing to spend that time fiddling around with his system to get it 'just right.' I've been a Linux user for almost 10 years now, and I settled on using RedHat because that's what's installed at work, and that's the distrib most commercial vendors target.
And as for installing a window manager, yes, it only takes a few seconds to install...after I've spent an hour or so downloading it over a crappy 33K connection.
But the main point is, I don't want to spend the time tweaking my system. I've got a setup that I like, all I want to do is upgrade my distrib every once in a while, and have it "just work". Hell, I could download all my software and create my own distrib if I had the time or inclination - but I've got a life, and the less time I have to spend fiddling with my system, the happier I am. I havn't recompiled a kernel in years.
And "new" Linux users aren't just coming from the Windows and Mac worlds, they're also coming from Solaris, AIX, etc. These folks are used to using mwm. They're not looking for a "slick" desktop, they want something similar to what they're used to... and that would be FVWM.
They have this thing now called the "internet" where you can get programs that don't come on the distribution CDs.
That's not the point. FVWM has been in RH since the beginning. It's small. Old-schoolers like it. There's no reason to take it out. It should be part of the standard distribution.
People would freak out if RH took out Pine and suggested they switch to Mutt, or KMail, or Balsa, or whatever.
RedHat is lame
on
fvwm Turns Ten
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
(rant)
Why on earth did RedHat take FVWM out of its distrubution? Like many long time Linux users, FVWM has been my window manager for years. It's small, fast, flexible, and infinitely configurable - with three CDs of space for RedHat 9, you'd think they'd be able to find a couple of megs for FVWM. Even their "switchdesk" utility still wants FVWM as an option.
Taking FVWM out of the standard distribution is just plain dumb, not to mention insulting to many Linux users. How many years was FVWM the default window manager for RedHat? I've been using FVWM for years on RedHat, but now I have to change to a more "modern" window manager because they can't spare 3 megs on their distribution CDs? Grrr.
Funny how SGI posted Viewperf results consistently until early 2000, when they began showing up at the very bottom of the result tables.
But yes, I suppose your 1 hour of experience at a trade show comparing a Fuel to PCs of unknown configuration is more meaningful than our lab's experience with machines that we OWN and use on a daily basis.
Maybe if you compared an IRIX box to a high end, workstation class Linux box with a high end NVidia card (which would be about 1/3 - 1/2 the cost of a Fuel), you would understand where I'm coming from. But, you obviously know everything there is to know, so I'll just shut up now.
Did you miss the part of the conversation where we were talking about Maya?
Did you miss the subject line?
But if you're only talking about graphics-bound situations, then there's absolutely NO contest between a Fuel and a high end Linux box with a Quadro4. SGI doesn't even bother putting Viewperf results on the SPEC site any more because they're so far behind the Intel workstations. In both fill rate and geometry performance, a modern high end PC card will slaughter anything SGI is still offering.
The only real difference between Fuel and Octane2 is the number of processors.
Ummm - what, exactly, doesn't add up? I was comparing a "dual 2GB Dell Linux box" with our IRIX boxes.
And a high end dual processor Linux box will smoke a dual processor Octane in most situations anyway, except those where massive amounts of data need to be moved across the bus.
The only reason we keep IRIX boxes around these days is because of old code that hasn't been ported to Linux.
Linux's 3D acceleration support is totally krappo.
The binary-only NVIDIA drivers are excellent - they are extremely stable and I have yet to find any issues with OGL compliance. A solid Linux box with a Quadro is an excellent replacement for an IRIX box.
Our lab has several O2s, a few Fuels, a few Octanes and a couple of Onyx IR3 systems. The only boxes that can keep up with a dual 2GB Dell Linux box in almost all situations are the Onyx or Octane systems. (Our lab does data vis, flight simulators, and we use Maya on both SGI and Linux systems).
If I were given the choice between a Fuel and a Linux box, I'd choose the Linux box in a heartbeat.
There are no 3D drivers for the R300 under Linux at present, and AFAIK, there are no plans for DRI drivers for this chip. The specs have not been released by ATI, and last I heard, they aren't going to be.
ATI is planning on releasing binary-only Linux drivers for the R300 at some point in the future, however.
I see very little innovation in either KDE or GNOME.
The look and feel of both are a hodgepodge of Windows, Mac, and CDE interfaces (although KDE at least has a more consistent feel across the board). Virtually all of the apps are direct rip-offs of commercial software, and most of the time they don't even make the effort to come up with an original name (hey, I'll just stick a "g" or a "k" in front of the name of the app I'm cloning!)
The success of KDE has been fueled by a high quality, commercial toolkit (Qt), and GNOME has been fueled by a desire to keep up with KDE.
The amount of work that has gone into both KDE and GNOME is impressive, and their accomplishments are also impressive. However, keep in mind that they are copying work which has already been done by MS, Apple and Sun. Both KDE and GNOME have benefited from "what folks have spent on CDE and so-on."
Cg is 100% source code compatible with the syntax of the DX9 HLSL, and the OpenGL 2.0 focus group is looking at Cg vs. 3DLab's proposal for inclusion in OpenGL 2.0.
The upshot is that if Cg is accepted as the shading language for OpenGL 2.0, DX9 and OGL 2.0 would have the EXACT same syntax.
Even if it isn't accepted as the shading language for OGL2, you will be able to write shaders in Cg and have them work on OpenGL 1.4+, and DX8+.
Because when I find bugs in the driver, I will be able to fix them faster than the company will get around to it.
Then how do you explain the difference in performance, features, and stability between the NVIDIA drivers and the DRI drivers? Have you have any idea of the expertise required to write/maintain 3D drivers? It's a nice theory, but in practice, not many people contribute patches to the DRI project.
Because I can compile the drivers for my CPU, and screw compatibility with other CPUs I don't have.
You can do this with the closed source NVIDIA drivers.
Because I will know it will work with the kernel I am running, which may be some mutant patched up version that the vender has never seen.
How can you know this? Just because you have the source code doesn't mean it will "just work." Your patched kernel can still cause problems with an open source driver.
Because when the card is discontinued, I will STILL have it, and will still be USING it, and will still want UPDATES to the drivers.
The closed source NVIDIA drivers support everything back to the original TNT (well over 4 years old), and upgrades to their drivers benefit all supported cards.
Because my bretheren who run *BSD also deserve to have good drivers.
Valid point. However, see this page (http://nvidia.netexplorer.org/news.html) "First, off, the drivers ARE being written, with help from NVIDIA." Far from ideal, but it's something.
Another valid point is support for platforms other than x86.
Because I am an embedded software developer, and damn it I NEED to be able to tweak the drivers if I am using it in my designs.
The X/DRI is not at all well suited to embedded applications. It's huge.
In theory, open 3D drivers would be great. In practice, however/unfortunately, it has not proved to be very practical. There are very few external developers contributing to DRI, and development has been excruciatingly slow. The DRI project is only now beginning alpha level support for fixed-function TCL pipelines, and an open source programmable pipeline driver isn't even on the radar screen.
Resolution *is* important, precisely because of what you note in your last paragraph. I saw the latest StarWars in digital, and I thought it was awful. You could actually see each square pixel of the projector- antialiasing was not the problem. One of the most objectionable scenes was when the two lovebirds were rolling around in the grass - all fine detail in the grass was lost to a bunch of chunky pixels. The aliasing that people are seeing with digital projection is an artifact of the projector resolution, *not* the media resolution.
The estimated "resolution" of 35mm film is about 4K x 4K. So not only does it benefit from much higher "pixel" density, it has the advantage that the "pixels" have a different size, shape and offset at every frame.
Do you really think that LucasFilm would spend as much as they did on AOTC and not antialias the opening credits?
Digital projection sucks. I'm not going to go to another digitally projected movie until projector resolutions increase by at least 2X.
How can they be "reinventing the wheel" when their implementation is out before OpenGL 2.0? There are already several real-time shading languages, e.g. http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/shadin g/ http://www.sgi.com/software/shader/overview.ht ml
Trying to create a standard without prototype implementations is fraught with problems (witness CORBA, for example). I suspect that NVIDIA's Cg began as some employee's thesis work and has been in internal development for some time. The proposed GL 2.0 language (proposed by a competitor, I might add) only hit the streets a couple of months ago. Why should NVIDIA drop everything they've been working on simply because 3DLabs thinks they know how to write an API? In case you weren't aware, the ARB didn't come up with the proposal, it came directly from 3DLabs.
You can ship a proposed standard. People do it all the time. C++ compilers come to mind.
Heh. Yeah, and how wonderful is that? I just love putting #pragmas and #ifdefs all though my code. You don't do much cross-platform development, do you? And you can't call anything OpenGL unless you license the name from the ARB.
NVIDIA has a strong investment in OpenGL - I don't know why you believe otherwise. They stand to gain nothing by killing OpenGL 2.0 - without OpenGL, they're not going to be selling 3D cards to Linux or Apple users. AFAIK, NVIDIA was the first vendor to ship OpenGL 1.3 certified drivers. Go to any conference session on advanced OpenGL, and you'll find an NVIDIA employee giving the lecture.
Honestly, I wish there was only one shading language : RenderMan Shading Language.
As elegant as the RM Shading language is, it doesn't map well to current hardware - it would be way too slow, unfortunately. But wait - that's a proprietary API, controlled by a single company. Isn't that what you're upset about? A de facto standard is not a true standard.
I doubt Cg will last more than a few years, at the most - hardware shading is still very, very young, and people are trying out the best way to do it. Personally, I think it's excellent that NVIDIA have put forth a high profile, cross platform, cross API shading language. Glide proved that developers won't accept a solution which locks them into a specific vendor. If NVIDIA is too tight with Cg, it will fade away - and they know that.
OpenGL 2.0 covers a *LOT* more ground than shaders. The OpenGL 2.0 proposal has not been ratified, and there is no time estimate as to when it will be come a standard. And as to when we'll have robust, compliant implementations, that's anyone's guess.
Cg is available *today*, as a TOOL for developers. If you'd prefer to write different assembly code for every card that supports shader functionality right now, hey, go for it. If you'd rather sit around and stare at the opengl.org website until GL2.0 is released instead of writing code, that's another option.
And why do you have to throw around words like "monopoly", "closed standard", etc.? NVIDIA provides excellent drivers for Linux, Mac and Windows. They don't dominate the graphics card industry because of dirty business practices, they dominate because they are leading the industry in feature implementation. They are taking an extremely active role in the development of OpenGL 2.0, and you can bet that a lot of what they learned from writing Cg will make it into the final standard. Honestly, who do you think has more experience with programmable pipelines, 3DLabs or NVIDIA?
And as for the "silly argument" - I never said "don't make hardware until the standard exists", what I said was that you can't support OpenGL 2.0 implementations until the standard exists. Duh. Whether the hardware is *capable* of supporting the standard is irrelevent. You can't ship a standard until it's a standard.
Direct3D 9 has a high level shader language. So maybe they're out to kill Direct3D 9 as well! Just think about it for a sec before coming up with absurd conspiracy theories. Do you really think Microsoft is happy that Cg supports OpenGL at all? Come on.
Why do people think that Cg competes with OpenGL 2.0? Cg supports both OpenGL and DirectX. It is an abstraction layer which allows you to write PORTABLE code. This is a GOOD THING. When OpenGL 2.0 comes out, all that is required is a new back end on the compiler, and you can reuse existing Cg shader code. You can't use OpenGL 2.0 shaders on DirectX or OpenGL 1.2, can you?
Saying Cg is a competitor to OpenGL 2.0 is like saying that a muffler is a competitor to a BMW M3. Cg IS ONLY FOR SHADERS. It's offers a high level language which translates to shader assembly. When OpenGL 2.0 comes out, all that is required is a new back end for the compiler, and you can REUSE your existing Cg shader code on OpenGL 2.0. Heck, you can reuse your Cg shader code on DirectX if you want. Does that mean that it's a competitor to DirectX? Geez.
And why aren't they supporting OpenGL 2.0 on their hardware? Because OpenGL 2.0 DOESN'T EXIST. It is a PROPOSAL at the current time - it is not a STANDARD yet. You can't make hardware support a standard until a standard exists. Get a clue, dude.
IIRC, the Banshee was not a truly integrated card - more like a 2D chip and Voodoo2 on the same card. Instead of using a separate 2D video card and passing it though the Voodoo, they placed a Voodoo chip on a 2D card and did the switching internally.
Yeah, and selling porn to minors is blatantly unconstitutional as well, is it?
What about NC17 rated movies?
Video games are quickly approaching the realism of video/film (DOA3, for example), so why is it a problem to put the same restrictions on them as other media?
So the jist of this article is that by running on a virtual layer, the things that you can do with it are restricted, e.g.
- you can't cheat games
- you can't pirate copyrighted material
Besides not being able to read audio CDRs, everything this guy mentions that you can't do with the PS2 Linux is either illegal or immoral. What a noble guy he must be.
How is running on a virtual layer a "shifty" way to get around the GPL? It's no more shifty that running Debian through VMware on Win2K.
But my 7500 is kickin' ass and takin' names in linux, and (unlike nVidia's cards) actually runs 2d well too:-)
First of all, how easy was it for you to install drivers for your 7500? Was it as simple as downloading two files and RPMing them? Or did you have to download the entire X tree, rebuild X, rebuild your kernel, rebuild, rebuild? So let's say you find a new bug in your Radeon driver every three days, are you going to want to keep rebuilding everything every couple of days? No thanks. I havn't had an NVIDIA crash or bug in about a year.
As for 2-D, Radeon performance lags way behind the GeForce. Last time I ran x11perf, my GeForce2 GTS score was more than double what my Radeon AIW was. For reference, why not have a look at http://www.linuxhardware.org/features/01/03/19/035 7219.shtml, then run some benchmarks of your own.
SGI keeps making mistake after mistake. I don't see how they have a snowball's chance in hell unless they axe their entire marketing team.
They came out with a pretty nice IA32 Linux workstation, the 330. Performance was good, the graphics smoked the O2's, and old IRIX customers were interested in porting to Linux. The machines were a little more expensive than what you could get from Dell, but SGI was fully supporting their machines. They provided documentation and APIs to help customers port from IRIX to Linux. The extent of Dell Linux support is "it should work on our machines."
The government and special effects industries have been two of SGI's biggest customers for years. Not only did SGI kill their IA32 Linux line before the government had a chance to buy them (the bulk of government spending comes at the end of the government's fiscal year. SGI dropped the 330 about a month before then), they killed their Linux line a couple of months before ILM decided to dump 600 O2 workstations in favor of Linux boxes.
They kept the 330 on the market for less than one year. People who wanted to get SGI AI32 Linux workstations never had an opportunity to buy them. If they had just kept their 330's on the market for another 3 months, they would have been selling them like hotcakes to former IRIX shops.
They're doomed. They've effectively handed away the Linux graphics workstation market to Dell, HP and custom shops.
The NVIDIA stability problems are old news. Yes, for the first 6 months they were available, they had some stability issues. Just because they stated in their README that they were having stability issues on multiprocessor boxes 18 months ago does not mean the stability issues exist today.
I only use dual processor boxes. I have a dual processor box at home, and we've got 11 dual processor Linux boxes at work. All use NVIDIA hardware, and all of them are very, very stable. Our lab does flight simulators and scientific visualization, so the machines get heavy 3D use on a daily basis. I havn't had any NVIDIA Linux box lock up in about a year.
Most of the people I've talked to who are having stability problems with the NVIDIA cards under Linux have either a cheap motherboard or an inadequate power supply. No driver in the world can compensate for either of these.
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No, it's not just fine. I've bought 4 wireless optical scroll mice to try them out, and I returned all four. One major problem is that I can't comfortably rest all three fingers on the mouse - the mice are designed for two fingers. But the biggest problem for me was that if you accidentally scroll the scroll button during the click motion, you lose the click. Plus, there is a lot more down motion required for a middle click than a regular click. I've found them too frustrating to use, so I keep going back to an old 3 button.
I suspect that most of the people claiming that the two button wheel mice are 'just fine' have been using two button mice all along. If you're used to using a real three button mouse in a *NIX environment, it's difficult to switch. The three button mice are just better for most operations.
These mice are nice to use, but they're expensive, not ambidextrous, and they don't have a wireless version:
http://www.contourdesign.com/pmo/
It depends on how close to the screen you are, and how large the screen is. I saw AOTC on a very large screen, and sat in the 4th row. I thought it looked like crap. The pixels were *very* obvious in a lot of scenes (the most memorable being a scene where there was a field of tall grass swaying in the breeze - pixelization galore). The color saturation of the image was quite good, though.
I have watched plenty of films in that same theater and never had any problems with the image (I saw Titanic in 70mm in that theater and it looked *awesome*). The problem is the pixel resolution of the current crop of projectors. They need to at least double (preferably quadruple) the resolution before I would go to see another digitally projected movie.
I can sort of see the argument here, but it basically ruins the point of having a standard interface like DirectX.
Not really. In the CPU world, you can optimize your application for i586, i686, athlon, etc. You can go the simple path and just add some compiler flags to your build, or you can write assembly code to take advantage of specific platform features.
Most games have assembly optimized code paths to squeeze out a few more frames per second already. And with Cg/HLSL, you can let the shader compiler make hardware specific optimizations for you.
If you don't mind "normal" performance, you can just write directly to standard Direct3D or OpenGL. If you want a few more frames per second, you add a custom code path. No big deal.
That's assuming "old-schooler" means a hardcore geek with tons of time on his hands, who is willing to spend that time fiddling around with his system to get it 'just right.' I've been a Linux user for almost 10 years now, and I settled on using RedHat because that's what's installed at work, and that's the distrib most commercial vendors target.
And as for installing a window manager, yes, it only takes a few seconds to install...after I've spent an hour or so downloading it over a crappy 33K connection.
But the main point is, I don't want to spend the time tweaking my system. I've got a setup that I like, all I want to do is upgrade my distrib every once in a while, and have it "just work". Hell, I could download all my software and create my own distrib if I had the time or inclination - but I've got a life, and the less time I have to spend fiddling with my system, the happier I am. I havn't recompiled a kernel in years.
And "new" Linux users aren't just coming from the Windows and Mac worlds, they're also coming from Solaris, AIX, etc. These folks are used to using mwm. They're not looking for a "slick" desktop, they want something similar to what they're used to... and that would be FVWM.
They have this thing now called the "internet" where you can get programs that don't come on the distribution CDs.
That's not the point. FVWM has been in RH since the beginning. It's small. Old-schoolers like it. There's no reason to take it out. It should be part of the standard distribution.
People would freak out if RH took out Pine and suggested they switch to Mutt, or KMail, or Balsa, or whatever.
(rant)
Why on earth did RedHat take FVWM out of its distrubution? Like many long time Linux users, FVWM has been my window manager for years. It's small, fast, flexible, and infinitely configurable - with three CDs of space for RedHat 9, you'd think they'd be able to find a couple of megs for FVWM. Even their "switchdesk" utility still wants FVWM as an option.
Taking FVWM out of the standard distribution is just plain dumb, not to mention insulting to many Linux users. How many years was FVWM the default window manager for RedHat? I've been using FVWM for years on RedHat, but now I have to change to a more "modern" window manager because they can't spare 3 megs on their distribution CDs? Grrr.
(/rant)
Funny how SGI posted Viewperf results consistently until early 2000, when they began showing up at the very bottom of the result tables.
But yes, I suppose your 1 hour of experience at a trade show comparing a Fuel to PCs of unknown configuration is more meaningful than our lab's experience with machines that we OWN and use on a daily basis.
Maybe if you compared an IRIX box to a high end, workstation class Linux box with a high end NVidia card (which would be about 1/3 - 1/2 the cost of a Fuel), you would understand where I'm coming from. But, you obviously know everything there is to know, so I'll just shut up now.
Did you miss the part of the conversation where we were talking about Maya?
Did you miss the subject line?
But if you're only talking about graphics-bound situations, then there's absolutely NO contest between a Fuel and a high end Linux box with a Quadro4. SGI doesn't even bother putting Viewperf results on the SPEC site any more because they're so far behind the Intel workstations. In both fill rate and geometry performance, a modern high end PC card will slaughter anything SGI is still offering.
The only real difference between Fuel and Octane2 is the number of processors.
Ummm - what, exactly, doesn't add up? I was comparing a "dual 2GB Dell Linux box" with our IRIX boxes.
And a high end dual processor Linux box will smoke a dual processor Octane in most situations anyway, except those where massive amounts of data need to be moved across the bus.
The only reason we keep IRIX boxes around these days is because of old code that hasn't been ported to Linux.
Linux's 3D acceleration support is totally krappo.
The binary-only NVIDIA drivers are excellent - they are extremely stable and I have yet to find any issues with OGL compliance. A solid Linux box with a Quadro is an excellent replacement for an IRIX box.
Our lab has several O2s, a few Fuels, a few Octanes and a couple of Onyx IR3 systems. The only boxes that can keep up with a dual 2GB Dell Linux box in almost all situations are the Onyx or Octane systems. (Our lab does data vis, flight simulators, and we use Maya on both SGI and Linux systems).
If I were given the choice between a Fuel and a Linux box, I'd choose the Linux box in a heartbeat.
There are no 3D drivers for the R300 under Linux at present, and AFAIK, there are no plans for DRI drivers for this chip. The specs have not been released by ATI, and last I heard, they aren't going to be.
ATI is planning on releasing binary-only Linux drivers for the R300 at some point in the future, however.
I see very little innovation in either KDE or GNOME.
The look and feel of both are a hodgepodge of Windows, Mac, and CDE interfaces (although KDE at least has a more consistent feel across the board). Virtually all of the apps are direct rip-offs of commercial software, and most of the time they don't even make the effort to come up with an original name (hey, I'll just stick a "g" or a "k" in front of the name of the app I'm cloning!)
The success of KDE has been fueled by a high quality, commercial toolkit (Qt), and GNOME has been fueled by a desire to keep up with KDE.
The amount of work that has gone into both KDE and GNOME is impressive, and their accomplishments are also impressive. However, keep in mind that they are copying work which has already been done by MS, Apple and Sun. Both KDE and GNOME have benefited from "what folks have spent on CDE and so-on."
Cg is 100% source code compatible with the syntax of the DX9 HLSL, and the OpenGL 2.0 focus group is looking at Cg vs. 3DLab's proposal for inclusion in OpenGL 2.0.
The upshot is that if Cg is accepted as the shading language for OpenGL 2.0, DX9 and OGL 2.0 would have the EXACT same syntax.
Even if it isn't accepted as the shading language for OGL2, you will be able to write shaders in Cg and have them work on OpenGL 1.4+, and DX8+.
Because when I find bugs in the driver, I will be able to fix them faster than the company will get around to it.
Then how do you explain the difference in performance, features, and stability between the NVIDIA drivers and the DRI drivers? Have you have any idea of the expertise required to write/maintain 3D drivers? It's a nice theory, but in practice, not many people contribute patches to the DRI project.
Because I can compile the drivers for my CPU, and screw compatibility with other CPUs I don't have.
You can do this with the closed source NVIDIA drivers.
Because I will know it will work with the kernel I am running, which may be some mutant patched up version that the vender has never seen.
How can you know this? Just because you have the source code doesn't mean it will "just work." Your patched kernel can still cause problems with an open source driver.
Because when the card is discontinued, I will STILL have it, and will still be USING it, and will still want UPDATES to the drivers.
The closed source NVIDIA drivers support everything back to the original TNT (well over 4 years old), and upgrades to their drivers benefit all supported cards.
Because my bretheren who run *BSD also deserve to have good drivers.
Valid point. However, see this page (http://nvidia.netexplorer.org/news.html) "First, off, the drivers ARE being written, with help from NVIDIA." Far from ideal, but it's something.
Another valid point is support for platforms other than x86.
Because I am an embedded software developer, and damn it I NEED to be able to tweak the drivers if I am using it in my designs.
The X/DRI is not at all well suited to embedded applications. It's huge.
In theory, open 3D drivers would be great. In practice, however/unfortunately, it has not proved to be very practical. There are very few external developers contributing to DRI, and development has been excruciatingly slow. The DRI project is only now beginning alpha level support for fixed-function TCL pipelines, and an open source programmable pipeline driver isn't even on the radar screen.
Resolution *is* important, precisely because of what you note in your last paragraph. I saw the latest StarWars in digital, and I thought it was awful. You could actually see each square pixel of the projector- antialiasing was not the problem. One of the most objectionable scenes was when the two lovebirds were rolling around in the grass - all fine detail in the grass was lost to a bunch of chunky pixels. The aliasing that people are seeing with digital projection is an artifact of the projector resolution, *not* the media resolution.
The estimated "resolution" of 35mm film is about 4K x 4K. So not only does it benefit from much higher "pixel" density, it has the advantage that the "pixels" have a different size, shape and offset at every frame.
Do you really think that LucasFilm would spend as much as they did on AOTC and not antialias the opening credits?
Digital projection sucks. I'm not going to go to another digitally projected movie until projector resolutions increase by at least 2X.
How can they be "reinventing the wheel" when their implementation is out before OpenGL 2.0? There are already several real-time shading languages, e.g.n g/t ml
http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/shadi
http://www.sgi.com/software/shader/overview.h
Trying to create a standard without prototype implementations is fraught with problems (witness CORBA, for example). I suspect that NVIDIA's Cg began as some employee's thesis work and has been in internal development for some time. The proposed GL 2.0 language (proposed by a competitor, I might add) only hit the streets a couple of months ago. Why should NVIDIA drop everything they've been working on simply because 3DLabs thinks they know how to write an API? In case you weren't aware, the ARB didn't come up with the proposal, it came directly from 3DLabs.
You can ship a proposed standard. People do it all the time. C++ compilers come to mind.
Heh. Yeah, and how wonderful is that? I just love putting #pragmas and #ifdefs all though my code. You don't do much cross-platform development, do you? And you can't call anything OpenGL unless you license the name from the ARB.
NVIDIA has a strong investment in OpenGL - I don't know why you believe otherwise. They stand to gain nothing by killing OpenGL 2.0 - without OpenGL, they're not going to be selling 3D cards to Linux or Apple users. AFAIK, NVIDIA was the first vendor to ship OpenGL 1.3 certified drivers. Go to any conference session on advanced OpenGL, and you'll find an NVIDIA employee giving the lecture.
Honestly, I wish there was only one shading language : RenderMan Shading Language.
As elegant as the RM Shading language is, it doesn't map well to current hardware - it would be way too slow, unfortunately. But wait - that's a proprietary API, controlled by a single company. Isn't that what you're upset about? A de facto standard is not a true standard.
I doubt Cg will last more than a few years, at the most - hardware shading is still very, very young, and people are trying out the best way to do it. Personally, I think it's excellent that NVIDIA have put forth a high profile, cross platform, cross API shading language. Glide proved that developers won't accept a solution which locks them into a specific vendor. If NVIDIA is too tight with Cg, it will fade away - and they know that.
OpenGL 2.0 covers a *LOT* more ground than shaders. The OpenGL 2.0 proposal has not been ratified, and there is no time estimate as to when it will be come a standard. And as to when we'll have robust, compliant implementations, that's anyone's guess.
Cg is available *today*, as a TOOL for developers. If you'd prefer to write different assembly code for every card that supports shader functionality right now, hey, go for it. If you'd rather sit around and stare at the opengl.org website until GL2.0 is released instead of writing code, that's another option.
And why do you have to throw around words like "monopoly", "closed standard", etc.? NVIDIA provides excellent drivers for Linux, Mac and Windows. They don't dominate the graphics card industry because of dirty business practices, they dominate because they are leading the industry in feature implementation. They are taking an extremely active role in the development of OpenGL 2.0, and you can bet that a lot of what they learned from writing Cg will make it into the final standard. Honestly, who do you think has more experience with programmable pipelines, 3DLabs or NVIDIA?
And as for the "silly argument" - I never said "don't make hardware until the standard exists", what I said was that you can't support OpenGL 2.0 implementations until the standard exists. Duh. Whether the hardware is *capable* of supporting the standard is irrelevent. You can't ship a standard until it's a standard.
Direct3D 9 has a high level shader language. So maybe they're out to kill Direct3D 9 as well! Just think about it for a sec before coming up with absurd conspiracy theories. Do you really think Microsoft is happy that Cg supports OpenGL at all? Come on.
Why do people think that Cg competes with OpenGL 2.0? Cg supports both OpenGL and DirectX. It is an abstraction layer which allows you to write PORTABLE code. This is a GOOD THING. When OpenGL 2.0 comes out, all that is required is a new back end on the compiler, and you can reuse existing Cg shader code. You can't use OpenGL 2.0 shaders on DirectX or OpenGL 1.2, can you?
How the #U&^ do you come up with this stuff?
Saying Cg is a competitor to OpenGL 2.0 is like saying that a muffler is a competitor to a BMW M3. Cg IS ONLY FOR SHADERS. It's offers a high level language which translates to shader assembly. When OpenGL 2.0 comes out, all that is required is a new back end for the compiler, and you can REUSE your existing Cg shader code on OpenGL 2.0. Heck, you can reuse your Cg shader code on DirectX if you want. Does that mean that it's a competitor to DirectX? Geez.
And why aren't they supporting OpenGL 2.0 on their hardware? Because OpenGL 2.0 DOESN'T EXIST. It is a PROPOSAL at the current time - it is not a STANDARD yet. You can't make hardware support a standard until a standard exists. Get a clue, dude.
IIRC, the Banshee was not a truly integrated card - more like a 2D chip and Voodoo2 on the same card. Instead of using a separate 2D video card and passing it though the Voodoo, they placed a Voodoo chip on a 2D card and did the switching internally.
Yeah, and selling porn to minors is blatantly unconstitutional as well, is it?
What about NC17 rated movies?
Video games are quickly approaching the realism of video/film (DOA3, for example), so why is it a problem to put the same restrictions on them as other media?
So the jist of this article is that by running on a virtual layer, the things that you can do with it are restricted, e.g.
- you can't cheat games
- you can't pirate copyrighted material
Besides not being able to read audio CDRs, everything this guy mentions that you can't do with the PS2 Linux is either illegal or immoral. What a noble guy he must be.
How is running on a virtual layer a "shifty" way to get around the GPL? It's no more shifty that running Debian through VMware on Win2K.
But my 7500 is kickin' ass and takin' names in linux, and (unlike nVidia's cards) actually runs 2d well too :-)
5 7219.shtml, then run some benchmarks of your own.
First of all, how easy was it for you to install drivers for your 7500? Was it as simple as downloading two files and RPMing them? Or did you have to download the entire X tree, rebuild X, rebuild your kernel, rebuild, rebuild? So let's say you find a new bug in your Radeon driver every three days, are you going to want to keep rebuilding everything every couple of days? No thanks. I havn't had an NVIDIA crash or bug in about a year.
As for 2-D, Radeon performance lags way behind the GeForce. Last time I ran x11perf, my GeForce2 GTS score was more than double what my Radeon AIW was. For reference, why not have a look at http://www.linuxhardware.org/features/01/03/19/03
SGI keeps making mistake after mistake. I don't see how they have a snowball's chance in hell unless they axe their entire marketing team.
They came out with a pretty nice IA32 Linux workstation, the 330. Performance was good, the graphics smoked the O2's, and old IRIX customers were interested in porting to Linux. The machines were a little more expensive than what you could get from Dell, but SGI was fully supporting their machines. They provided documentation and APIs to help customers port from IRIX to Linux. The extent of Dell Linux support is "it should work on our machines."
The government and special effects industries have been two of SGI's biggest customers for years. Not only did SGI kill their IA32 Linux line before the government had a chance to buy them (the bulk of government spending comes at the end of the government's fiscal year. SGI dropped the 330 about a month before then), they killed their Linux line a couple of months before ILM decided to dump 600 O2 workstations in favor of Linux boxes.
They kept the 330 on the market for less than one year. People who wanted to get SGI AI32 Linux workstations never had an opportunity to buy them. If they had just kept their 330's on the market for another 3 months, they would have been selling them like hotcakes to former IRIX shops.
They're doomed. They've effectively handed away the Linux graphics workstation market to Dell, HP and custom shops.
The NVIDIA stability problems are old news. Yes, for the first 6 months they were available, they had some stability issues. Just because they stated in their README that they were having stability issues on multiprocessor boxes 18 months ago does not mean the stability issues exist today.
I only use dual processor boxes. I have a dual processor box at home, and we've got 11 dual processor Linux boxes at work. All use NVIDIA hardware, and all of them are very, very stable. Our lab does flight simulators and scientific visualization, so the machines get heavy 3D use on a daily basis. I havn't had any NVIDIA Linux box lock up in about a year.
Most of the people I've talked to who are having stability problems with the NVIDIA cards under Linux have either a cheap motherboard or an inadequate power supply. No driver in the world can compensate for either of these.