NVIDIA Publicly Releases Its OpenCL Linux Drivers

[V!NCENT]

NVidia leading again. Anyone seeing a pattern here?

The rate at which nVidia is advancing their closed source driver is slower than the pace of ATI driver development.

Talk to you again in a year or so when AMD has both a kickass closed source driver with more releases and a fully functional Open Source Gallium3D driver

[yogi_berra]

The rate at which nVidia is advancing their closed source driver is slower than the pace of ATI driver development.

Talk to you again in a year or so when AMD has both a kickass closed source driver with more releases and a fully functional Open Source Gallium3D driver

And in two years AMD drivers will go on beer runs! Something to look forward to...

[mirza]

Someone really smart could do h.264 decoder-on-steroids now.

[BlackStar]

Someone really smart could do h.264 decoder-on-steroids now.

Unfortunately, you'd need an OpenCL-capable GPU for this - and OpenCL-capable GPUs tend to have dedicated (and faster!) video decoding blocks already. Given the shared buffers between OpenCL/OpenGL, this would probably be a viable approach for video decoding on Gallium drivers (unless there are plans to add a dedicated video decoding API/tracker - no idea).

Now, OpenCL-based encoding and we are talking.

[_txf_]

Someone really smart could do h.264 decoder-on-steroids now.

seeing as you need to be using a nvidia driver you might as well use vdpau. It wroks today and is much more efficient.

What would be cool is if someone added h.264 acceleration to encoding with opencl.

[V!NCENT]

And in two years AMD drivers will go on beer runs! Something to look forward to...

"Oh V!NCENT! Can I please swap my nVidia card for your ATI card because mine isn't officialy supported anymore! Q_Q"

[bartek]

So, will this help the people working on the Nouveau open-source nvidia drivers?

[Veerappan]

So, will this help the people working on the Nouveau open-source nvidia drivers?

I have no special knowledge of the matter, but I'm guessing that the answer is not really. The most that I could see the nouveau developers using these drivers for is as a reference platform for compatibility testing of the nouveau driver implementation. i.e. write a feature in Nouveau, see if it works using an opengl/opencl program. If it doesn't, see if the same program is broken in Nvidia's driver.

I wouldn't be surprised if the EULA for the Nvidia drivers has a statement that you aren't allowed to use the drivers to reverse engineer Nvidia proprietary info, yadda, yadda, yadda..

[BlackStar]

First try: crash!

// Runs on AMD's implementation :/
CL.CreateContextFromType((ContextProperties*)null, DeviceTypeFlags.DeviceTypeDefault, IntPtr.Zero, IntPtr.Zero, &error);

Anyone see what's wrong with that code?

[Ant P.]

I have no special knowledge of the matter, but I'm guessing that the answer is not really. The most that I could see the nouveau developers using these drivers for is as a reference platform for compatibility testing of the nouveau driver implementation. i.e. write a feature in Nouveau, see if it works using an opengl/opencl program. If it doesn't, see if the same program is broken in Nvidia's driver.

I wouldn't be surprised if the EULA for the Nvidia drivers has a statement that you aren't allowed to use the drivers to reverse engineer Nvidia proprietary info, yadda, yadda, yadda..

Hence the reason for my post on the first page. The EULA seems worded specifically to stonewall any effort by the nouveau devs to make a free OpenCL-capable driver.