NVIDIA Has Gallium3D Support In Fedora 13

While it's exciting to have kernel mode-setting, RandR, and EXA / X-Video acceleration for NVIDIA hardware in an open-source driver that is reliable since the mainlining of its DRM code and its adoption in Ubuntu 10.04 and other distributions, Fedora has already employed Nouveau support to various extents in their recent releases.

Fedora started out by shipping the Nouveau DDX driver, then turned to kernel mode-setting support that has matured and is used by default with the current Fedora 12 release. With Fedora 13, Red Hat is again shipping with the latest free software NVIDIA bits, which now includes 3D support. Thanks to an update to the mesa-dri-drivers-experimental package, there is 3D / OpenGL support enabled for NVIDIA hardware. This 3D support is coming from Nouveau's Gallium3D driver for most of the NVIDIA graphics hardware while there is also a classic Mesa driver for old NV hardware that recently came about. Yes, there is finally a deployed Nouveau-NVIDIA Gallium3D driver that will be easily deployable out in the wild with Fedora 13.

Fedora 13 is scheduled to be released towards the middle of May while the first alpha release is coming in early March. Red Hat's Adam Williamson mentioned this 3D support on Nouveau via his blog where he mentions that the Spring RTS framework, Compiz, Neverball, Foobillard, and Quake 3 are all working for him with a GeForce 9400GT graphics card and the Gallium3D driver.

Adam also sent in a screenshot to us of the Nouveau NV95 Gallium3D driver also running with Nexuiz. Needless to say, this week we will be delivering Nouveau Gallium3D benchmarks atop Fedora Rawhide.

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