NVIDIA PR Responds To Torvalds' Harsh Words

[TheBlackCat]

To be completely honest, I feel like we push for a little too much sometimes: the whole attitude toward everything having to be open source is a little ridiculous. Sure it would be nice if Nvidia released open source drivers, but to be honest, I'm more interested in the performance of my drivers than the license. That said, I really do wish Nvidia would have a bit of a nicer attitude toward us. I'm sure they will soon though with Linux gaming on the rise.

The problem isn't so much NVidia releasing open-source drivers. That is a pipe dream, they simply aren't going to do it, and they probably can't because of patents in the drivers.

The thing people are asking for is NVidia releasing the documention on their cards' hardware so other people can make clean-room driver implementations. It really doesn't make any difference to NVidia, the nouveau project will figure out the hardware on their own so the documentation will be released eventually no matter what NVidia does. However, if NVidia releases the documentation it would save the noveau developers a ton of work and hopefully greatly speed up the driver implementation on Linux. So NVidia loses nothing and Linux users gain a huge amount.

[balouba]

.i. (o.o) .i. (oh look it's Linus)

[Qaz`]

"Recently, there have been some questions raised about our lack of support for our Optimus notebook technology"

Interesting way to describe the situation caused by not supporting or even caring at all about most laptops sold the last 2 years with their graphics hardware. I can feel the deep care flowing my way.

[GreatEmerald]

the gaming example is pure bullshit. You can play games as good with an AMD card as you can with a Nvidia card.

I wish that was true, but no. I'm a HD4890 user, and from my experience, there are many games on Wine that just won't work properly on AMD hardware while NVIDIA users report that everything is just fine. Pretty much most of the issues I've had were with Unreal Engine 3 games - Mass Effects and Unreal Tournament 3, which don't even start properly. Older games work fine, though.

[stalkerg]

Fuck You Nvidia!

My NVIDIA card I use for http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq8bCGiRUL4 only.

[jvillain]

I think the "free & open" fanatics sometimes confuse the difference between a project and a product. NVidia offers products, not projects. They manage to make their products work within the confinements of a kernel that basically only supports in-kernel drivers. It's quite a challenge, but they come through with a product that works.

I don't offer products or projects. I offer cash. And since AMD made the move to at least try to play nice I have stopped giving it to NVidia and given it exclusively to AMD. Yes I could use the blob if I wanted to use a 3 year old kernel along with older crappy drivers for every thing else. And if I never, ever want to update again. My hope is that some share holders catch wind of the fuss and start asking questions about the support. What a great experience for people trying out Linux. Learning to make the blob work. Nothing like it to drive people back to Windows. Beside NVidia has already said they won't support Wayland. Since my distro of choice has had wayland binaries for months now I highly suspect NVidia isn't going to be a choice at all soon.

..l.. NVidia.

[F i L]

nVidia wont support Optimus laptops, and yet people are still confused as to why we want an Open Source driver stacks...

[asdx]

FOAD Nvidia.

[droidhacker]

Ok, main points are as follows;

1) We don't give a rat's ass about "consistent experience". In fact, we DON'T WANT a consistent experience, we want a proper LINUX experience, not some bloated bluescreen experience of crap not working.
2) There is no USE in a "consistent experience". Different OS, ***DIFFERENT NEEDS***.
3) If you want to use the same code, forgetting all about (1) and (2), releasing the code does NOT contradict this!!!! All releasing the code does is provides some FREE DEBUGGING AND PROGRAMMING. FREE LABOR!!! RELEASE THE FUCKING CODE NVIDIA DOUCHEBAGS!!!


FUCK YOU NVIDIA, WE DON'T WANT YOUR BULLSHIT!

[patrik]

Uhm, I don't really get that PR.

1) Linux end users benefit from same-day support for new GPUs , OpenGL version and extension parity between NVIDIA Windows and NVIDIA Linux support, and OpenGL performance parity between NVIDIA Windows and NVIDIA Linux.

So if the drivers where open they would stop giving same-day support and Windows parity?

2) We support a wide variety of GPUs on Linux, including our latest GeForce, Quadro, and Tesla-class GPUs, for both desktop and notebook platforms. Our drivers for these platforms are updated regularly, with seven updates released so far this year for Linux alone. The latest Linux drivers can be downloaded from www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html.

So if the drivers where open people would start ripping support out?

3) We are a very active participant in the ARM Linux kernel. For the latest 3.4 ARM kernel – the next-gen kernel to be used on future Linux, Android, and Chrome distributions – NVIDIA ranks second in terms of total lines changed and fourth in terms of number of changesets for all employers or organizations.

Sure, the rank of #2 might suffer if they let other people work on their drivers.