Nouveau Makes Its Own NV40 Firmware Replacement

[stikonas]

which means > 80% of NVIDIA users will need it.

[fixed for you]

Which is certainly an improvement over 95%

[AdamW]

nVidia will win big! They haven't spend a cent developing the open source drivers.

And I am pretty sure that is their secret plan. If the Nouveau developers stopped what they do, nVidia might start releasing specs.

You mean, the way they did all those years before nouveau existed?

[droidhacker]

which means > 80% of NVIDIA users will need it.

How do you figure that? You think they sold 4 times as many 8000+ GPUs than all the previous combined? Even accounting for retirement of older hardware.... many (most) linux users aren't in it for the top-end graphics anyways, which means that most are happy with a slightly older card. My guess would be that on linux, the 8000+ cards are VASTLY outnumbered by older cards.

[birdie]

How do you figure that? You think they sold 4 times as many 8000+ GPUs than all the previous combined? Even accounting for retirement of older hardware.... many (most) linux users aren't in it for the top-end graphics anyways, which means that most are happy with a slightly older card. My guess would be that on linux, the 8000+ cards are VASTLY outnumbered by older cards.

You have answered your own comment.

Jokes aside see the stats on valve/steam, 8000 series NVIDIA GPUs vastly outnumber all other NVIDIA GPUs.

[Svartalf]

But nothing beats a full featured distribution with Compiz enabled at first boot.

Heh... And how can you get that with proprietary drivers? You're NOT supposed to be shipping those blobs with the distribution- period. Doing so breaches your GPL license grant on the Linux kernel. You can, post install, do it as an end-user (since there's nothing keeping you from doing whatever you want with things...)- but a distribution vendor can't do that as they're publishing/distributing, which is where the GPL takes on full force. You don't want to go there.

Since you can't distribute a working 3D distribution for an NVidia user- they have to download/install, post installation, the working 3D support, unless you use Nouveau drivers, NVidia can't give that experience. Only Intel and AMD (after a fashion, depending on which model of card...) can give you that. Because they're FOSS.

NVidia loses because of that piece. If the FOSS support were more there with AMD or Intel had actual credible 3D chipsets, there'd be a differing story with NVidia in this space.

[Svartalf]

In this case the Nvidia binary blob still works better than any other offering for linux graphics. It has support for OpenGL 3.2 OpenCL and CUDA, mesa is playing catch up big time. Even flgrx isn't as advanced as the Nvidia blob

Hm... Considering that they've just added hardware tessellation for GL3.2 on fglrx, I'd say that while they're not as stable as NVidia's blob, AMD's is on parity or slightly ahead right now. Main reason I don't use AMD's stuff is more because the driver's aren't as stable as the Linux ones right now.

Mesa's the only one playing catch-up in the sense you're talking to there. Moreover...here's a hint: Unless Ryan Gordon, LGP, myself (as part of LGP or as an indie port...), or someone like Uningine's team does something with OpenGL 3.2, you're not going to see a lot of that being used for at least 6-12 months yet to come. 3.2 support's sort of nice, but it doesn't impact the card's performance, driver usability, etc.

[Kano]

You may forget that it is even possible to install the nvidia binary in live mode (this partly is working for fglrx too but with lower success rate).

[smitty3268]

Jokes aside see the stats on valve/steam, 8000 series NVIDIA GPUs vastly outnumber all other NVIDIA GPUs.

I don't know how the NVIDIA usage breaks down, but I do know that you shouldn't be relying on those numbers. They represent the windows gaming market, which is obviously going to move to newer/faster cards much earlier than the larger general purpose market. I have no idea how Linux OS affects the numbers - there might be more people throwing linux on old machines, or there may be more users who are tech enthusiasts and upgrade their machines more often than the typical windows user.

[Svartalf]

You may forget that it is even possible to install the nvidia binary in live mode (this partly is working for fglrx too but with lower success rate).

You still have to download it, Kano.

No internet or dialup kind of puts a kibosh on being able to DO that.