Another Look At The Latest Nouveau Gallium3D Driver

[V!NCENT]

I remember the days (OK not so distant) where I had to buy the best of the best hardware simply to play Counter-Strike: Source at 30FPS maxed out, now you can buy a yesterdays graphics card and play an awesone game (Warsow, no pun intended) at 30fps on Linux with a reversed engineered FLOSS driver.

And people are complaining...

[pingufunkybeat]

Which easy of use?

Working out of the box, xrandr, kernel modesetting.

[blackiwid]

I know that I cannot forbit the nouvou developer to do their work, but I hope at some point they stopp wasting more time to fix Linux experince with nvidia cards. So maybe its ok that it runs and with 3d-desktop but I think that It would be really bad if they do such "good" work that the driver would become very close to the open amd driver, because what would that be a message to companys. Don´t wast money and time to release the driver specs, because the linux guys support you even more if you don´t, or something like that. So if someone would ask me I would only make availible a 2d driver and if someone complains you could say buy hardware from a company that support Linux well like AMD. But to bring it to something like the intel driver performance and feature set it would be ok(on intels side the hardware pretty much slows it to this minimum), but please don´t make it much better. Its not fair.

Normaly it should not be easy to make a such good driver like the open amd driver because they have no doku I hope thats so and then all is good anyway.

[werfu]

the solution is NOT to buy nvidia graphic cards whenever possible

You know that there use to be a time we were saying this about ATI and that NVidia was the Linux king because it provided a driver. I bought my laptop at that time, and still use it as my daily drive.

IMHO, looking at the graphics it seems like the driver is CPU restricted. I know the guys are really working on adding features and card support, but I'd really wish they'd go after this bottleneck.

[89c51]

You know that there use to be a time we were saying this about ATI and that NVidia was the Linux king because it provided a driver. I bought my laptop at that time, and still use it as my daily drive.

Things change and at this point AMD is doing much more than NVidia. If they decide to change their stance then mine towards them will change also. As simple as that.

[crazycheese]

Which confirms what we always knew: there's a huge gap between open-source support in amd and nvidia.

Even so, reverse engineered 3d drivers with interactive framerates are several kinds of awesome. Too bad that nvidia remains the bad kid in the playground.

It is not. Sadly.
I had 9800gt, in urban terror 4.1, fullhd, I had near 130fps.
Now on 4770 with opensource drivers I get 50 at BEST, normally 40.
Nvidia on reversed achives 35...

And I would still be able to use proprietary, but working nvidia driver.
A question remains though - why noveau developers are not improving amd opensource, but hack nvidia blob. A resource waste if you ask me (but its their choice).

1.

the solution is NOT to buy nvidia graphic cards whenever possible

2.

As if people will listen . Most users (especially the new "came from Windows and now use Ubuntu" crowd) simply don´t care for any of this.

3.

Monitor hotplugging, out of the box experience.

I would APPLAUSE you all, if you provide me a single answer.
If I buy amd card, instead of nvidia, how will amd pay more money to opensource drivers? Please reveal me this mechanism.

I buy amd card, I dont buy nvidia card - where is the increased opensource moneyflow? What do I really pay for?

[Remco]

I would APPLAUSE you all, if you provide me a single answer.
If I buy amd card, instead of nvidia, how will amd pay more money to opensource drivers? Please reveal me this mechanism.

I buy amd card, I dont buy nvidia card - where is the increased opensource moneyflow? What do I really pay for?

You pay AMD, they get more money, they invest more in R&D including Linux. What's hard to understand?

[marek]

A question remains though - why noveau developers are not improving amd opensource, but hack nvidia blob. A resource waste if you ask me (but its their choice).

Unpaid developers work on drivers for the hardware they have, and they mostly do it for fun. If you gave a gfx driver developer a PC with a pretty old gfx card and that would be the only PC he would have, you would see a new driver emerging for that card no matter how obsolete piece of crap it is.

[pingufunkybeat]

A question remains though - why noveau developers are not improving amd opensource, but hack nvidia blob. A resource waste if you ask me (but its their choice).

Basically, there are important distributions out there (RedHat) who want all GPUs to have working support out of the box. Since Nvidia is boycotting this like the plague, they fund developers to reverse-engineer it.

[discordian]

Monitor hotplugging, out of the box experience.

My out-of-the-box-open-source experience is a dead black screen, atleast on Ubuntu since it switched to nouveau (using GT 240).

Not so much a point against nouveau but ubuntus stupid decisions to automatically use unstable drivers (the nv driver works nice).