NVIDIA Drops Their Open-Source Driver, Refers Users To VESA

[yoshi314]

That is probably why AMD/ATI decided to open-up like intel has been doing for some time. These are companies that want to be "friends" with the enterprise market, not like nvidia who seems to mostly target the consumer/enthusiast market. I believe in the end open-source will rule the world, but not until we are all old geezers.

ati opened up but at the same time they dropped support for older cards, leaving some people with no support. so it's a strange situation, no matter how you look at it.

it looks like they outsorced legacy support to xorg devs, while maintaining a friendly image, because of pushing out the technical documentation.

don't misunderstand, i like ati/amd for it. but from that perspective it looks weird.

[Dragonlord]

Still preferable to outsource this to xorg devs as this way we get an open source driver for those cards instead of having nothing in the nVidia case.

[bridgman]

ati opened up but at the same time they dropped support for older cards, leaving some people with no support. so it's a strange situation, no matter how you look at it.

Not to nitpick, but we started opening up (again) in 2007, nearly all of the docs for 3xx-5xx were out by early 2008, Alex had *already* implemented a lot of the features needed to make good use of the docs (EXA acceleration, Xv, and a lot of the KMS work for 4xx and earlier).

Removing 3xx-5xx from the Catalyst drivers happened a year after the docs were out, and that was done for all OSes not just Linux.

it looks like they outsorced legacy support to xorg devs, while maintaining a friendly image, because of pushing out the technical documentation.

Including *our* xorg devs, yes

[undoIT]

Hoping that Nvidia loses a TON of customers over this.

Granted, AMD isn't that big of a friend... would of been nice to see ATI stand alone... but oh well.

Nvidia, evil++.

ATI+AMD, dysfunctional.

Sigh...

They just lost one. For the past couple months I've been waiting for a Lenovo ThinkPad T410s to be available with switchable graphics. Glad I read this. Now I don't care about the switchable graphics, I'll just get a laptop with Intel integrated graphics. I don't really need the discrete card most if not all or the time anyways but thought it would be nice to have in case I did.

I usually upgrade my laptop(s) every 9-12 months. Having read this, I will not be purchasing any laptops with Nvidia cards in the future.

I'll be selling my Latitude E6400 with NVS 160M card soon, which constantly crashes in Linux when Compiz is enabled with binary driver. Good riddance.

[yoshi314]

Not to nitpick, but we started opening up (again) in 2007, nearly all of the docs for 3xx-5xx were out by early 2008, Alex had *already* implemented a lot of the features needed to make good use of the docs (EXA acceleration, Xv, and a lot of the KMS work for 4xx and earlier).

Removing 3xx-5xx from the Catalyst drivers happened a year after the docs were out, and that was done for all OSes not just Linux.

yeah, i'm not that good with history

still, windows xp users have no problems with dropped support because they can use the older driver on their system.

i still feel like legacy support was cut to reduce fglrx development/maintenance costs by moving it to another driver team, which is not fully involved with amd/ati. so it looks a bit like outsorcing

[Ragas]

and not pointless features like openGL4 with no game and no programm use this....

openGL3 to.... for end user only a graphic demo 'unigin' use this no game and no enduser programm!

why sould the opensource driver waste time for never used features ?

Because it's the future. It makes the game look better than it does now. Or do you really think linux game graphics are state of the art right now?!
What you said is exactly the point why linux gaming sucks.

[Dragonlord]

Linux Gaming sucks because no OpenSource game uses OpenGL3 and FBO based rendering!

Wrong, they do.

[V!NCENT]

By analizing Qaridarium's points, intead of the way he put it; I realy have to agree with his last two posts... entirely.

[Dragonlord]

Sure I want OpenGL 4.0 in games... it provides stuff to work with which is great

[Dragonlord]

Xreal its the only one and thats only a stubit Quake3 port

If you only know that engine, then yes, this might be true... but there is more in the world than just Xreal.