NVIDIA Releases Another 180.xx Beta Driver

[Kjella]

Let's talk outcomes

Let me just draw up a couple outcomes:

a) The open source community with some help from the participating companies gets their act together and deliver a state of the art drivers and infrastructure for all graphics cards that will open their specs.

b) The open source community continues to remain a divided bunch of experimental efforts (different driver projects, infrastructure projects that go nowhere, license issues and so on) that never really catch up with current technology and hardware.

This is already an experiment in progress for AMD. The question seems to be whether nVidia should join them or not. If you think that comes for free, you can't have been hanging out here very long. I don't know how many hours AMD has spent on compiling and clearing documentation (apart from their code contributions) but it's been many. What have they really gotten in return?

I know it's frustrating not being able to track down a bug but from nVidias point of view, is it worth spending 1000 hours to get 10 hours of minor fixes back? No. If they don't believe that the OSS community will ever amount to much, releasing specifications has no business case.

Of course, then someone will always say "Release the specs and we'll build a great driver for you, just you see!". If you want nVidia to release specs, the best you could do is get an AMD card and start hacking to make that a smashing success. Or at least that it'll give enough in return that clearing specs isn't a complete waste of time.

In short, I'll take a good blob over poor open source any day. If the alternative is dual-booting into Windows, which is all blobs then it's still the better option even though I prefer open source. Not above everything else though.

[deanjo]

Let me just draw up a couple outcomes:

a) The open source community with some help from the participating companies gets their act together and deliver a state of the art drivers and infrastructure for all graphics cards that will open their specs.

b) The open source community continues to remain a divided bunch of experimental efforts (different driver projects, infrastructure projects that go nowhere, license issues and so on) that never really catch up with current technology and hardware.

This is already an experiment in progress for AMD. The question seems to be whether nVidia should join them or not. If you think that comes for free, you can't have been hanging out here very long. I don't know how many hours AMD has spent on compiling and clearing documentation (apart from their code contributions) but it's been many. What have they really gotten in return?

I know it's frustrating not being able to track down a bug but from nVidias point of view, is it worth spending 1000 hours to get 10 hours of minor fixes back? No. If they don't believe that the OSS community will ever amount to much, releasing specifications has no business case.

Of course, then someone will always say "Release the specs and we'll build a great driver for you, just you see!". If you want nVidia to release specs, the best you could do is get an AMD card and start hacking to make that a smashing success. Or at least that it'll give enough in return that clearing specs isn't a complete waste of time.

In short, I'll take a good blob over poor open source any day. If the alternative is dual-booting into Windows, which is all blobs then it's still the better option even though I prefer open source. Not above everything else though.

Bingo, foss fanatics put up or shut up with what you have now, reach a level that rivals the blobs and then start saying that your ready for the next challenge.

[bridgman]

The good news is that the open source community does seem to be coming through. Right now probably seems like the "worst of times" from a user perspective because all of the important changes in the open source stack are just starting to come to life and if anything you are seeing a short-term reduction in performance and stability, but that will pass over the next 6 months.

I know everyone would like it to take a couple of weeks rather than a couple of years, but it is happening, and surprisingly quickly given the magnitude of the changes and the number of people involved.

[bulletxt]

The good news is that the open source community does seem to be coming through. I know everyone would like it to take a couple of weeks rather than a couple of years, but it is happening. Right now probably seems like the "worst of times" from a user perspective because all of the important changes in the open source stack are just starting to come to life and if anything you are seeing a short-term reduction in performance and stability, but that will pass over the next 6 months.

I understand your point and I am the first one to be happy. But when you buy bread, do you eat it after 1 year? No. Hardware isn't different. If I pay for something, it has to do what it's meant for immediately. Now this discussion can go on for 20 pages, but this is a fact (unless there are crazy users that in year 2020 use a Radeon 9600XT).

So to make it simple, what I see as a solution, is that all amd employes that code FGLRX should just stop with that sh*t. it's a fact that it is sh*t so there isn't much to say about this. and phoronix, please please stop it with FGLRX articles. Every FGLRX driver introduces 2 incomplete features, fixes 2 bugs and generates 20 new bugs. ok? stop it.

Instead of sending them home, they get the code they think can be useful, they open source it and start working together with the comunity. Don't even try to tell me some of them already work with novel and those nice stories. AMD MUST INTERRUPT THE CODING OF THAT SHI*TTY driver and invest in the open source one. If AMD doesn't stop that sh*t, it means they already know the open source one will never be as it should. be serious and stop what I can consider the worst driver in the linux market.

this is the only real solution I see as of today. for the rest, if you want to use your today card in year 2011 then ok, but in that case I would be stupid to tell someone to buy AMD cards if they use Linux and the choice will go automatically to NVIDIA.

let's be serious guys, when you buy an icecream you eat it before it melts. same goes for a GPU card.

[bridgman]

I agree with your point about timeliness but I disagree strongly with your interpretation of the current situation. You are assuming that the current state (or maybe the state a few months ago) of product support relative to product introduction will continue indefinitely unless drastic changes are made.

We stopped supporting open source development some time in 2002 and re-started in 2007. In the last 15 months we have caught up with 5 years of product introductions (3xx, 4xx, 5xx) and have display/modesetting support for two more generations (6xx, 7xx) including all currently shipping products. Once we get 3d engine support out for 6xx/7xx (which is pretty close now) we will have caught up with the last 6 years of product introductions and support for future generations of GPUs should be able to come out shortly after launch.

Feel free to reserve judgement until the 6xx/7xx 3d engine support is released, but once that happens I don't think you will have much justification for arguing that there will be an ongoing, unacceptable delay between product launch and open source driver support.

[deanjo]

The good news is that the open source community does seem to be coming through. Right now probably seems like the "worst of times" from a user perspective because all of the important changes in the open source stack are just starting to come to life and if anything you are seeing a short-term reduction in performance and stability, but that will pass over the next 6 months.

And 6 months down the road the RV870 cards will be out and then the waiting game starts again.

[hdas]

Let me stick to the thread subject, by saying that this driver seems to improving each time. Just compiled the shining new 2.6.28 kernel on my Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit system and the NVidia 180.18 guns down the entire gtkperf 1000 rounds in less than 100 seconds on my notebook with 8400M GS (at one time, with 170'ish drivers, its used to be 240 seconds!):

GtkPerf 0.40 - Starting testing: Thu Dec 25 04:41:55 2008

GtkEntry - time: 0.66
GtkComboBox - time: 11.42
GtkComboBoxEntry - time: 9.40
GtkSpinButton - time: 1.65
GtkProgressBar - time: 1.84
GtkToggleButton - time: 1.69
GtkCheckButton - time: 0.72
GtkRadioButton - time: 1.81
GtkTextView - Add text - time: 51.36
GtkTextView - Scroll - time: 4.99
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time: 3.20
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time: 4.18
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time: 5.25
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time: 0.73
---
Total time: 98.91

Regarding VDPAU, I running into a known issue that my video card is running out of VRAM when I am on dual monitor and playing 1080i, but works fine when only running my notebook display. Meanwhile, 3d games like Doom3 run flawlessly as ever. Overall, its holiday time! Thanks NVidia!

[DeepDayze]

Let me stick to the thread subject, by saying that this driver seems to improving each time. Just compiled the shining new 2.6.28 kernel on my Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit system and the NVidia 180.18 guns down the entire gtkperf 1000 rounds in less than 100 seconds on my notebook with 8400M GS (at one time, with 170'ish drivers, its used to be 240 seconds!):

Regarding VDPAU, I running into a known issue that my video card is running out of VRAM when I am on dual monitor and playing 1080i, but works fine when only running my notebook display. Meanwhile, 3d games like Doom3 run flawlessly as ever. Overall, its holiday time! Thanks NVidia!

Is there a bug report for that? How much memory your card have?

[bulletxt]

Feel free to reserve judgement until the 6xx/7xx 3d engine support is released, but once that happens I don't think you will have much justification for arguing that there will be an ongoing, unacceptable delay between product launch and open source driver support.

I will shut up only when I see AMD cards working like NVIDIA. at that point, not only I will drink 3 bottles of champaigne, but I will also suggest to everyone to buy AMD gpu's since their drivers work out of the box and are open source. But I think I should stop my dream here. Let's see, let's see..

[_txf_]

And 6 months down the road the RV870 cards will be out and then the waiting game starts again.

but programing for them shouldn't be very different from 6xx and 7xx. Possibly for more advanced features there will be changes (which won't be used by the foss driver). I suspect that directx 10 is doing foss a favor here and the fact that more and more general purpose computing is forcing a certain amount of "homogenization" of the tech.