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Nvidia submits patches to open source driver

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Re: Nvidia submits patches to open source driver

#31

Post by XorNot »

valisystem wrote: post #27
gtaylor wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The community drivers are pretty limited if you need to drive more than two monitors or need to work with non-trivial OpenGL applications or games. Neither open source driver has very good power management, either. They both leave a lot to desire.

For what I see, future is bright on AMD side for those features. I don't follow the news closely, but phoronix reports on the subject have change from a long string of steady bad support and performance to a seemingly constant progress since last year.

I switched back from AMD proprietary to the open-source drivers just recently. The open-source drivers just seem to work better for desktop Linux, whereas the proprietary drivers were okay but since neither is driving gaming for me yet felt a bit too clunky.

The big change is definitely dynamic power management in the OSS drivers - now my PC doesn't sound like a turbine while I'm in Linux all the time.

Re: Nvidia submits patches to open source driver

#32

Post by zimbatm »

gtaylor wrote: post #2

On a somewhat related (non-mobile) note, I really regret buying my AMD 5870 three years ago. Things have changed quite a bit in that nvidia has done some serious work on their Linux binary drivers, while AMD's has been utterly unimpressive, if not embarrassingly bad. I understand that Linux has been a lesser priority for both companies, which is understandable. It's not going to make them the truckloads of money that…

Don't forget Intel. While their GMA chips don't have the performances of a Nvigia/AMD desktop GPU they have a much better track record at publishing code in the open. In fact I don't think there are even proprietary binary drivers for those.

Re: Nvidia submits patches to open source driver

#33

Post by exDM69 »

nolok wrote: post #5

Note that this is Tegra related, which might explain their new-found eagerness to help (unlike desktop, they don't fully "own" the mobile high performance chips market yet, and it moves very fast) Still, a great news

As far as I understand it, this set of patches allows you to (or at least aims in the longer term to) run Nouveau user space on top of Nvidia Tegra Kernel drivers (did anyone read the code, does this use nvidia kernel drivers or nouveau kernel drivers?), which are already mostly open source.

This would mean that you could run a full open source graphics stack on an ARM System on Chip (SoC). I don't know if this is possible on any current SoC out there.

Re: Nvidia submits patches to open source driver

#35

Post by weland »

CmonDev wrote: post #25
weland wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I understand that Linux has been a lesser priority for both companies, which is understandable. It's not going to make them the truckloads of money that the rest of their market segments will. Actually, they are both theoretically very interested in the Linux market because of their GPGPUs. Windows is pretty much unheard of in scientific computing (in November it powered a whopping 2 of the 500 comuters in top500).…

NVidia is probably not targeting top500, so is focusing on the 99% of market.

Neither are most of the computers used for scientific computing in this world. 99% of the high-performance computing market is anything but Windows.

Re: Nvidia submits patches to open source driver

#37

Post by mrottenkolber »

gtaylor wrote: post #2

On a somewhat related (non-mobile) note, I really regret buying my AMD 5870 three years ago. Things have changed quite a bit in that nvidia has done some serious work on their Linux binary drivers, while AMD's has been utterly unimpressive, if not embarrassingly bad. I understand that Linux has been a lesser priority for both companies, which is understandable. It's not going to make them the truckloads of money that…

There was a time when AMD was hyped to heaven for their efforts. Wrongfully so in my opinion. Nvidia cards just always worked on linux, you had to install the blob but then it was a breeze. Fglrx on the other hand...

I tried to setup a dual-gpu notebook for a friend last week. It was impossible. fglrx doesn't support the chips anymore and ubuntu doesn't support the legacy blobs. Complete fail. I had to tell her ubuntu won't work on her computer. (The gpus will overheat without a proper driver)

So thank you AMD for basically not providing any drivers at all, and if you do, them crashing randomly taking the kernel with them. Thank you Nvidia for just working.

Imho in that regard Linus didn't know what the f*ck he was talking about.

Re: Nvidia submits patches to open source driver

#38

Post by tolle »

gtaylor wrote: post #14
lelandbatey wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has bought both brands recently-ish, I have to say I would VASTLY prefer AMD over Nvidia for Linux compatible graphics cards. I found that the community-provided AMD drivers where leagues ahead of Nvidia proprietary and community drivers (in terms of shear usability). Here's a thread where I test my Nvidia 670 and my AMD 6870 in Linux. I explain why I like one over the other: http://www.reddit.com/r/li…

The community drivers are pretty limited if you need to drive more than two monitors or need to work with non-trivial OpenGL applications or games. Neither open source driver has very good power management, either. They both leave a lot to desire.

I run 3 monitors off a 5850 without issues. The power management situation is pretty much solved from kernel 3.11 or something like that. Enabled by default for 3.13+ I believe.

Re: Nvidia submits patches to open source driver

#40

Post by dmm »

mrottenkolber wrote: post #37
gtaylor wrote: post #2

On a somewhat related (non-mobile) note, I really regret buying my AMD 5870 three years ago. Things have changed quite a bit in that nvidia has done some serious work on their Linux binary drivers, while AMD's has been utterly unimpressive, if not embarrassingly bad. I understand that Linux has been a lesser priority for both companies, which is understandable. It's not going to make them the truckloads of money that…

There was a time when AMD was hyped to heaven for their efforts. Wrongfully so in my opinion. Nvidia cards just always worked on linux, you had to install the blob but then it was a breeze. Fglrx on the other hand... I tried to setup a dual-gpu notebook for a friend last week. It was impossible. fglrx doesn't support the chips anymore and ubuntu doesn't support the legacy blobs. Complete fail. I had to tell her ubunt…

AMD has been paying developers for years to develop free drivers. It has taken this long because they essentially had to rewrite everything and modern display drivers are complicated beasts.

The in-kernel, fancy KMS, AMD drivers should just work right now for many people. 2D is faster than the proprietary driver and the 3D speed is a significant fraction of the proprietary driver.

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