GeForce 9600GT Gets Open "nv" Support

Late last month NVIDIA had unveiled the GeForce 9600GT graphics card as direct competition to the AMD Radeon HD 3850 / 3870. This new PCI Express graphics card still isn't supported by the latest official driver (169.12), but it's been reported to work (at least partially) when using the Tesla 171.05 driver. There is now, however, limited open-source support for this card.

NVIDIA's Aaron Plattner has pushed out an update to the xf86-video-nv driver that fixes connector mapping and TMDS initialization on certain GPUs, new chip names for existing GeForce 8 products, and adds support for the GeForce 9600GT. While this is good news, don't forget that the xf86-video-nv driver is basic, limited to 2D support, and its code is rather obfuscated. This new version of xf86-video-nv is 2.1.8. The release announcement and source download links are available off the X.Org mailing list.

On another note, it's the one-week anniversary of OpenTheBlob.com, which is an open letter to NVIDIA Corporation. This letter is requesting better open-source involvement by NVIDIA. There were 5,000 signatures on the fifth day, and now on the seventh day there are over 7,100 signatures (and plenty of embedded comments).