NVIDIA Calls It A Month With Five Driver Releases

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA Calls It A Month With Five Driver Releases

You may have just installed the 180.37.04 Linux driver since it was released merely six days ago with OpenGL 3.1 support, but this morning NVIDIA has officially released the 180.44 Linux driver. The NVIDIA 180.44 Linux driver officially adds support for several new graphics processors, fixes various OpenGL crashes (including the KDE 4.x Plasma problems), adds support for OpenGL 3.0 floating-point depth buffers, brings a number of VDPAU fixes, and also other changes that were introduced in the recent beta releases. The GPUs that are now officially supported by NVIDIA under Linux are the Quadro FX 380, Quadro FX 580, Quadro FX 1800, Quadro FX 3700M, Quadro FX 3800, and Quadro NVS 295...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzE3OQ

[Fixxer_Linux]

I don't know if it's the "ATI open source" effect on Nvidia, but they seem to have eaten steroids on that one...

Perhaps their line is now to provide "gold" support on their closed blobs, to provide a true alternative to open source ATI ?
Perhaps not, but I guess anyway that the ATI strategy can't have no effect on NVidia behaviour.

Especially that linux customers are generally geeks that buy much hardware (and give also much advices to friends).

[superppl]

I think you hit the spot. Nvidia knows the ball is in their court, and it's their turn to make a move. Well, they're making their move, this is it.
I personally like it; ATI probably won't truly catch up for another year, but in the mean time my Nvidia runs as well, if not better, in linux than on windows.

Also, thank you ATI for making a move and breaking the stalemate.

[DoDoENT]

ATi is dropping support for their old hardware, and Nvidia is making a platinum support for all their hardware...

Oh gosh, I wish I had Nvidia GPU.

[hobbes]

I don't know if it's the "ATI open source" effect on Nvidia, but they seem to have eaten steroids on that one...

Perhaps their line is now to provide "gold" support on their closed blobs, to provide a true alternative to open source ATI ?
Perhaps not, but I guess anyway that the ATI strategy can't have no effect on NVidia behaviour.

Especially that linux customers are generally geeks that buy much hardware (and give also much advices to friends).

I wrote about it last week and get flamed by - that's ok. This is no coincidence, they are making a very real push to gold proprietary support on GNU/Linux, which is a very good thing.

AMD/ATI opensource effort is paying off - to all of us.

The thing is NVIDIA doesn't want to even cross user's mind the idea of open their blob, and I'd believe they are prevailing. I don't see a word out to try to persuade them otherwise.

In meantime I am glad to see a video driver on pair with Windows.

[DoDoENT]

I don't see a word out to try to persuade them otherwise.

That's just because their proprietary driver WORKS, unlike fglrx.

[superppl]

If Nvidia were to open up their blobs, then their trade secrets could potentially be out in the open and everyone would benefit from them. It might no longer be a matter of choose Nvidia, they have better software, it would become choose Nvidia, I like how thier name sounds.

But honestly, it would be awesome if they opened up some ancient drivers and hardware from like 2002 or something, so that alongside ATI's stuff, Intel can freaking catch up already.

[DarkCloud]

They should have make it 6 for the month. I just downloaded the 44 driver and it craps out on my Kubuntu distribution runing on my laptop, but the last three releases have also failed to work.

[perpetualrabbit]

Hi people,

I have been trying for weeks now to get vdpau working on my system, running ubuntu studio 8.10.

I have a lowly 1400MHz AMD Geode processor (single core, no hyperthreading), with an NVidia 7600GS (512MB, AGP) video card. On the NVidia website I think I found that this setup should actually work.
I have bought this rig expressly to save money on electricity, because it is always on, and the Geode uses only 15 Watts. At the time I bought it, there was no atom processor yet.

I am trying to play .h264 files, quite big: about 1280x768 pixels, so not quite HD yet, but big.

I have installed the latest NVidia driver and updated mplayer and xine.
Still, I get error messages in mplayer (stops in line such-and-such in mplayer.c and messes up my terminal) and xine works but is very choppy.

In short: vdpau seems not to be working. What is your opinion: 1. This will never work, get a faster computer, or 2. This could work once I get all drivers and xine/mplayer software right?

Some advice greatly appriciated.

[doctoren]

I think you'll need a Geforce 8 or higher for VDPAU.