Benchmarks Of The Latest Nouveau Gallium3D Driver

[kazetsukai]

But I think that it's fair to expect your expensive, complex, 40 nm high-tech hardware with millions of transistors to do something else than act as an unaccelerated framebuffer.

Wow, someone finally got this out of you.

And I insist that such a thing should be possible without downloading binary drivers.

Yes it should, but it just isn't right now. Open drivers do not provide all of the functionality that the blobs do. In some cases, they provide -most of what you would need-, but never 100% of the binary featureset. Until they have a similar level of maturity, the open drivers just.aren't.practical. -for some people-, ATI -or- (to a much lesser extent) NVIDIA, which you refuse to acknowledge.

But if a company has the power to one day say "OK, we're leaving this market segment, no more drivers for you, use VESA from now on", then this is a very different situation.

You seem to be implying that NVIDIA will do this. Sure, they have the power to "walk away", but for Linux, the momentum is only growing, and NVIDIA's blob has the best OpenGL implementation of those available -anywhere- on Linux. They're not going to walk away from that support and commitment when hundreds of thousands of people amongst several thousand businesses rely on them almost exclusively.

[pingufunkybeat]

I'm not implying anything, I'm just pointing out that they have the power to do this. And this alone is very unfortunate, as Nvidia is a corporation, and corporations do things for profit, and it's not like providing desktop Linux drivers is particularly profitable.

It doesn't have to be malice, they might decide that Linux desktop business is not bringing them any profit, and concentrate on high-end professional workstation market where they deliver preinstalled drivers to the high-end consumers who actually bring them the money.

[Panix]

Yes it should, but it just isn't right now. Open drivers do not provide all of the functionality that the blobs do. In some cases, they provide -most of what you would need-, but never 100% of the binary featureset. Until they have a similar level of maturity, the open drivers just.aren't.practical. -for some people-, ATI
-or- (to a much lesser extent) NVIDIA, which you refuse to acknowledge.

Finally, it is said.

Nvidia is a corporation and ATI (AMD) is not?

ATI's attempt at offering both binary and open source drivers is good (compared to Nvidia) but the problem is both driver sets are NOT optimized (feature set wise) and have major issues in various areas. The improvement and progress can be considered slow, too, perhaps. You can argue what's ideal and that you only need FOSS driver functionality all you want. Not everyone wants to do only the things you do. *Also*, why can't someone say the card can DO A so I want these features supported? If the Nvidia binary blob allows that, then someone might pick a Nvidia card for that purpose even though they'd prefer a company who is more open source oriented. It's about priorities. There seems to be a lot of praise to both sides without really examining those two points. At least, that's my perception.

When I build my budget computer, I'll probably look at a 'cheap' ATI card to try. I don't want to invest in a mid-grade card until I see the experience for myself.

[V!NCENT]

Well, so people, but duuuuhhhhhh!
Without companies nothing is produced. What it is about is what products and services do they make and what products an services are what we want.

Now a company can do good or bad things, but they need money to pay salaries and stay alive. Now one could choose multiple ways of doing so. If nVidia where to release specs or in some other way enlight us and help noveau then realy; fine!
Intel and AMD showed to be profitable with their FLOSS options open and nVidia shows that they are profitable going blob only. So it is about what path a company chooses.

In the end companies pay people and get paid by paid people in exchange for a product that improves some part of one persons daily life. Perfect balance, until people can't get what improves their lives.

This is where voting with your wallet comes from. This has nothing to do with fanboyism, but the world we live in. In the end money is just an ideology of what a person is allowed to take, based on the significanse of their contribution to the world.

[kraftman]

That's a strong statement that can be proven wrong by one example.
My example is Half Life 2 + Episode 1 + Episode 2 + Portal. I played all of them on highest settings with a HD 4650.
The Framerate was ok, game ran very fluent.
The only problem are some rendering glitches with the sky but when trying the open source driver I got exactly the same rendering glitches... Maybe it's wine?

Was it playable using Open Source drivers? Wine is optimized for nvidia cards (however, this is changing afaik), so it can be wine bug.

[kazetsukai]

If nVidia where to release specs or in some other way enlight us and help noveau then realy; fine!

I doubt this would change your opinion on NVIDIA given even your most recent post track record.

This is where voting with your wallet comes from. This has nothing to do with fanboyism, but the world we live in.

Yeah, I wonder what company has the majority Linux GPU share... Intel. How about discrete graphics? *hint* You guessed it.

People already do vote with their wallets without you telling them about it.

[LinuxID10T]

Can I haz GTX 4xx benchmarks and a comparison in the 2D performance of Nouveau and NV?

[V!NCENT]

I doubt this would change your opinion on NVIDIA given even your most recent post track record.1

I'd say "Try me", but then again nVidia proves my stance by not doing so. Oh and I like Intel, just not their Poulsbo crap. But then again nobody seems to like their Poulsbo crap.

[pingufunkybeat]

You seem to be implying that NVIDIA will do this. Sure, they have the power to "walk away", but for Linux, the momentum is only growing, and NVIDIA's blob has the best OpenGL implementation of those available -anywhere- on Linux. They're not going to walk away from that support and commitment when hundreds of thousands of people amongst several thousand businesses rely on them almost exclusively.

Oooops, they did it:

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=24368

[highlandsun]

The Poulsbo driver is certainly a mess. Not sure the hardware is all bad. Just the idiotic licensing crap that goes with it...