Free Software NVIDIA Driver Now Supports 3D Acceleration With All GeForce GPUs 159
aloniv writes "The reverse-engineered free/libre and open source driver for NVIDIA cards Nouveau has reached another milestone. 'The Nouveau driver in the current Linux 3.8 development branch has recently acquired everything that's necessary to support the 3D acceleration features of any GeForce graphics hardware. Together with a current version of libdrm and the Nouveau 3D driver in Mesa 3D 9.0, this allows Linux applications to use 3D acceleration even with the most recent GeForce graphics cards."
Re:Good News (Score:3, Informative)
My happy is that now the kernel team can see how the free driver works, and I don't have to patch NVIDIA's driver (eg: with 3.8.0-rc2 --the current beta kernel-- and likewise 3.8.0-rc1 --last weeks beta kernel--) I had to patch the current NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-310.19 drivers by changing a few lines so that it would build. It tanked on the newest kernels. NVIDIA does a good job with stable kernels (although they sometimes delay getting drivers out for recent stable kernels by a few days to a week or more), but now I can use Nouveau's driver to look at accelerated video (not just games but HD TV too).
Re:Good News (Score:5, Informative)
Too bad what is to be the next Debian Stable has already long been frozen... major, groundbreaking improvements always seem to be implemented at a time that guarantees waiting through an entire release and then some.
How does that stop you from installing it? It doesn't. Just because it won't be prepackaged in your favorite distro doesn't mean you can't use it.
Re:Good News (Score:5, Informative)
It's a choice between having a single source who can fix bugs, or a significantly larger pool of people who are capable of fixing those bugs. Employees of a single company are beholden to the business goals of that company, goals which are highly likely to differ from your needs as a user.
In short, if the source is open you have a much bigger chance that someone will be both willing and able to fix the bug thats causing you problems, or that you could entice someone to do so if it really matters to you.
Re:Even the GeForce 256? (Score:5, Informative)
The nouveau driver supports everything from NV04 upwards - NV01 and NV03 (NV02 never made it to production) are very different. In particular, PFIFO (the engine on the card that submits command the GPU) on NV01 doesn't support DMA at all, and NV03 has broken DMA. For that (and other) reasons, if support were desired for these cards, it would be in a separate driver. However such a driver would essentially be of academic interest, since these cards only accelerate simple shapes (like triangles and curves).
That having been said, one of the nouveau developers has done some reverse engineering of the NV01, the finiding of whic hare in the envytools [github.com] notes.
Re:Good News (Score:4, Informative)
It's a choice between having a single source who can fix bugs, or a significantly larger pool of people who are capable of fixing those bugs. Employees of a single company are beholden to the business goals of that company, goals which are highly likely to differ from your needs as a user.
Err, why are my needs likely to differ greatly with the goals of the company? If I buy a product from a company, I'd say the chances are good that my needs jive with their goals.
Sweet!!! I am going to go download the beta drivers for OSX to try out the new bug fixes.. oh, wait, I can't do that...
Nevermind -- when are the chipset fixes coming out for the 780i/790i chipsets that cause SATA to act all funny under Linux? Any day now.. oh, wait, never..
Well hell, I am going to go grab the BeOS drivers for my NVidia card so I can hack on that OS... oh wait... no such drivers...
In the future, please don't assume that your needs cover everyone's needs.
Re:Good News (Score:5, Informative)
nouveau
1. since its free software it can co-exist with other drivers, and lets x auto detect. your only option on live cds
2. feature complete 2d and 3d rendering
3. rock solid stable. Its actually more stable than the proprietary driver
nvidia
1. fast, perfomance comparable with other OSs
2. closed source, doesn't play well with other drivers. But lets face it, if your playing video games, them too are closed source, and if your on a proper normal installed system, you don't need other video drivers.
3. 100% feature complete, uses every last feature of the hardware as intented.
4. supports OpenCL and vector programming.