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."
No thanks to NVIDIA though... Intel's better (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd never buy a system with NVIDIA graphics even though I support the nouveau projects efforts. The problem is NVIDIA doesn't cooperate with the nouveau project and has provided little to no support for it. I'm not going the ATI path though. AMD just pulls the cloth over your eyes to what is really going on. Good PR is not good enough for this user. AMD doesn't provide sufficient documentation to produce a completely free solution.
Which means that right now Intel's graphics (except for the PowerVR based stuff which is actually third party) are the only good option. And before you go on about what crap Intel's graphics are they have significantly improved from years past and have some of the best support. The Intel drivers even support features the proprietary graphics drivers are lacking from NVIDIA/ATI. So depending on what you really care about Intel's the best bet. The game developers are even tailing to the code because they can (since the drivers are completely free) which has produced a significant boost in performance for some games.
Re:Good News (Score:5, Interesting)
decent fan control support is still in preparation and will initially only cover older GeForce chips......Furthermore, the driver can't switch between the various graphics chip and memory speeds with many current cards and often causes the graphics hardware to run at the slowest operating speed – the 3D performance that is achievable this way is usually sufficient for 3D composited desktops such as Unity or the Gnome shell but stays well behind what NVIDIA's proprietary driver can tickle out of the same graphics hardware.
So that's how it is. Still good to see progress.
Great news for ARM (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the problems with the official binary driver is that it only supports x86. With an open source driver, there's no reason you can't use it on any architecture out there. There might be some people interested in PCI cards on PowerPC, but the big interest here is with ARM-based systems.
Re:Good News (Score:5, Interesting)
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. ...
Sit back and let me tell you a little story.
A few years ago, I bought a laptop, the first one I'd ever owned that had a 64-bit CPU. I set it up as a dual-boot system, with 64-bit versions of Windows XP Pro and whatever OpenSUSE that was current at the time (10.2 or 10.3, I'm guessing).
There were no 64-bit Windows drivers for the wifi card. None.
There were no binaries of 64-bit Linux drivers. But, there was source. While I took C++ in school way back when, and have worked with other people's code quite a lot in the last few years, I am in no way an expert coder. Nonetheless, it took me only about 20 minutes to figure out that I needed to change 1 line in one header file, and then I was only a configure; make && make install away from having a working wifi card.
That model card is still being used in new laptops today, and there are still no 64-bit Windows drivers for it. Every one of those laptops is sold with 32-bit Windows, even if it has a 64-bt CPU.
Meanwhile, the particular card discussed above is being used at this very moment to transmit this post from that very same laptop (running a 64-bit OS) to you.
*fin*