Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Steps Up Its Game & Runs Much Faster 143
An anonymous reader writes "With the Linux 3.16 kernel the Nouveau driver now supports re-clocking for letting the NVIDIA GPU cores and video memory on this reverse-engineered NVIDIA driver run at their designed frequencies. Up to now the Nouveau driver has been handicapped to running at whatever (generally low) clock frequencies the video BIOS programmed the hardware to at boot time, but with Linux 3.16 is experimental support for up-clocking to the hardware-rated speeds. The results show the open-source NVIDIA driver running multiple times faster, but it doesn't work for all NVIDIA hardware, causes lock-ups for some GPUs at some frequencies, and isn't yet dynamically controlled. However, it appears to be the biggest break-through in years for this open-source NVIDIA driver that up to now has been too slow for most Linux games."
Re:THIS is a potentially "huge score" for Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the year of the Linux desktop is over.
We used to have Gnome 2, KDE 2 and 3, OpenOffice, Mozilla, Flash Player and many useful tools against Windows XP. It was superior technology, but the impact was limited (LiMuX?).
OpenOffice is in ruins (and hardly better than 10 years ago), the Gnome community is split, and KDE keeps getting fatter. Meanwhile Windows 7 is a half decent operating system, and Office 2007 has upped the game considerably. Even Google targets Linux only for some of their products.
The battle for the desktop is over and lost.