NVIDIA PR Responds To Torvalds' Harsh Words

[kotakotakota]

Yes, they are a bit overdue with dropping support for their cards, aren't they? I expect that by next year, all cards older than the 200 series will be dropped from active support. They already dropped support twice for older hardware, after all.

I hope not... My main system runs a 200 series, and all my others run hardware that is older than that....

[deanjo]

Yes, they are a bit overdue with dropping support for their cards, aren't they? I expect that by next year, all cards older than the 200 series will be dropped from active support. They already dropped support twice for older hardware, after all.

Na the farthest back I can see them dropping support for is back to the FX series (GF 5). G92 era cards are still out there in abundance and have compute capabilities and their current driver easily handles GF6+ cards.

[figuerom]

This has been interesting to learn about.

I was unaware of the licensing issues between the binary Blobs and the Linux kernel.
I was also not aware that Nvidia might not be supporting Wayland. Or at least very slow to.

I'm not opposed to using blobs, but I understand the importance of even having the mere open-source drivers exist now (which I didn't before).
I'll probably avoid Nvidia now only on the basis of that future support might be terrible. Which could be an over-reaction on my part.

Right now I'm about to buy a new computer (on a budget and buy a graphics card later... maybe). I was really on the ropes between buying a new AMD Trinity APU + Ati or Ivy Bridge + Nvidia.
But after reading all these comments and links I've decided on getting an AMD Trinity APU.
AMD could be slow to support Wayland in the Blob; I'll have an Ok open source driver to fall back on. I'll also have the chance to use Crossfire if/when that gets put in when I'm not happy with the speed of games. I was going to get Intel Ivy bridge but I want to do some decent gaming without discrete graphics card even though Mesa is pretty solid for Intels IGP. I think AMD will improve faster in its Blobs and open-source though I could day overly optimistic about AMD also.

[GreatEmerald]

Na the farthest back I can see them dropping support for is back to the FX series (GF 5). G92 era cards are still out there in abundance and have compute capabilities and their current driver easily handles GF6+ cards.

...except that it has already been dropped. And a while ago. First they dropped everything up to the FX series, and then they dropped the FX series itself, at least from what I can see on the openSUSE wiki. And sure, there are plenty of older cards on the market - but you didn't see that stopping AMD, did you? And I'd imagine that there were still FX cards being sold when they dropped support for that.

[Licaon]

well, it's gets better or worse: http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news...-and-nres.aspx

[Hirager]

well, it's gets better or worse: http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news...-and-nres.aspx

Wow, just wow - I am speechless...

[V!NCENT]

The chart you posted... the GPU market distribution has nothing to do with open vs closed drivers, as 99% of that market doesn't even have access to open drivers.

True, but developpers do. Developpers create the games and the Android updates. That's hurting customers indirectly. In the end that was the lethal blow to 3dfx as well as developpers opted for the open solution.

He is referring to the advantages of IGPs.

Exactly. IGP's together with CPU's powerfull enough to run console ports (which renders nVidia cards useless for the majority of the market.

What advice would you give to NVIDIA, who have no chance of creating an IGP in the x86 space?

Make a x86 killer: turn the GPU into a fully parallel CPU powerhouse, put the patented 3rd party magic in the silicon and go full blow open documentation mode, before it's too late.

And no, I don't expect people to write better drivers. Just kidding; heared of the company that makes faster than CUDA, CUDA-only drivers?

[V!NCENT]

And don't tell me that lousily combined with ARM, this uber nVidia CPU can't be done. In fact: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTA3OTI

Yes, you blob fans can start begging nVidia for that documentation, starting from now on ;-)

[figuerom]

well, it's gets better or worse: http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news...-and-nres.aspx

I have a feeling a few Nvidia executives were fired that day.

[tecknurd]

Try how easy it is rotating one of the screens.

Do not need that feature. Do not care for it. I do believe in the early years of Windows, graphics had an issue with this. Really you are blaming nVidia just for this feature when other features works fine. ATI and now AMD has multiple issues with their closed source driver.

Even with open source radeon's nearly opengl3.0 you can play skyrim or crysis2. Lack of support for OpenGL extensions is bad but not as bad as you think.

Who cares about Skyrim and Crysis --- whaterever Skyrim is. From what I see at the following page, mostly means not finished for OpenGL 3. They are most likely done with implementing OpenGL 2. nVidia already finished OpenGL 3 in I think 2007. That means nVidia had OpenGL 3 in Linux for 5 years. Sure nVidia implements OpenGL through their own libraries. The installation and management of these libraries depends on distribution. Not all distributions can switch from X11 OpenGL libraries and then to OpenGL libraries that nVidia provides. I use Calculate Linux which is based on Gentoo. Gentoo implements an easy way to switch these libraries while still having them be installed.

http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature

You could use AMD graphics closed source driver fglrx, but then you also run into drivers that are short on features compared to Windows drivers.

If the nvidia driver was open source your vdpau problem would most probably already be fixed and you wouldn't have had to wait for years even for xrandr support. If the flash plugin was open source the color palette switching problem with vdpau would be fixed already. Closed Source software is good for a company to protect whatever "secret" knowledge they need to protect but it is bad for everybody else.

Open source community is not fast enough to keep up with the changes that need to be done. For gamers sake like you, NOW. For example the open source drivers for AMD Radeon are still incomplete after the celebration of the documentation. The features of Radeon cards from open source drivers should already be implemented, but they are not. The reason for this is why outsourcing for development projects affects finishing a product. nVidia has a lot of resources to test VDPAU and several other features in house that they can keep an eye on. nVidia has expertise to report what each of the testing machine has a problem with. The open source community gets variations of expertise, so reports of problems varies. The time differences for the open source community to deliver bug reports is 24 hours to as much as weeks. This is not a project that needs a fix NOW or should of been fixed yesterday.

No it is bad for a company to keep the product protected like graphic cards. If nVidia does open up their products, there will be no competition. AMD opens up their graphic products, but only a small amount. AMD does not tell the developers how anti-aliasing works for their graphic cards and many other features. Open source developers for Radeon can only see just the hardware. There are a lot things happening in software that AMD also likes to keep secret. Graphic cards are VLIW processor type, so both AMD and nVidia keeps a lot of compiler magic to make their video cards perform fast. What I mean "compiler magic" is not at the time compiling the driver, but compiling the data (OpenGL, DirectX, OpenCL, CUDA) in code that VLIW understands. I think eventually, the open source developers for Radeon graphics may have to create a project that deals with VLIW compiler separately to get the performance of the open source driver up to the performance that the close source drivers or fglrx.

nVidia is not a non-profitable company. nVidia is a business that is doing it for a profit, but they are doing it ethically. nVidia is still in business, so this means there is competition and then competition lowers prices and finally further improvement for graphic cards. AMD is not different. You just have to understand about businesses then you get why they do what they do.

I have not upgraded my nVidia drivers, so VDPAU might be fixed in 295.49 or the next stable release stated by the Gentoo community.

FYI, nVidia does add features to their video cards like 30-bit color to my aging GeForce8 8400M GS even though open source programs does not support these amount of colors.