New Patches Aim To Improve Smoothness & Latency Of NVIDIA On GNOME

[phoronix]

Phoronix: New Patches Aim To Improve Smoothness & Latency Of NVIDIA On GNOME

Canonical's Daniel van Vugt who is known for his prolific contributions to GNOME the past several years particularly in regards to performance has a new merge request open for helping with the "smoothness" of the NVIDIA driver on GNOME Shell...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Smoothness-GNOME-June-20

[xen0n]

inb4 the mandatory "Why help NVIDIA?" replies

[ernstp]

I can come up with at least 3 different flamewars related to this!

[Tuxie]

Not having looked at the code, is this something that also affects KDE/KWin/Plasma or is it specific to the GNOME Shell?

[schmidtbag]

inb4 the mandatory "Why help NVIDIA?" replies

To me it's not a matter of why help Nvidia because the answer to that is obvious. In fact, I don't think there's really anything here to ask, just more of "desktop environment developers shouldn't have to be picking up Nvidia's slack when Nvidia obviously doesn't want anyone's help (otherwise they'd open-source and be more compliant with Linux's modern standards)".
In some ways I sort-of feel the same about Red Hat and Valve contributing toward AMD's drivers, but the difference there is those drivers are open-source and those companies have a financial incentive. Although AMD should have been doing those improvements themselves, opening up the drivers welcomes change and improvements, which so far has proven to work.

[xen0n]

To me it's not a matter of why help Nvidia because the answer to that is obvious. In fact, I don't think there's really anything here to ask, just more of "desktop environment developers shouldn't be picking up Nvidia's slack when Nvidia obviously doesn't want anyone's help (otherwise they'd open-source and be more compliant with Linux's modern standards)".
In some ways I sort-of feel the same about Red Hat and Valve contributing toward AMD's drivers, but the difference there is those drivers are open-source and those companies have a financial incentive. Although AMD should have been doing those improvements themselves, opening up the drivers welcomes change and improvements, which so far has proven to work.

Actually my answer to that question is "you don't help NVIDIA; you help free software desktop stack and that certain faction of users". The whole point is the base stack has the ability to evolve, and the evolution can be spearheaded by anyone skilled and motivated. Users may not feel the pain of running closed stacks, until they hit bugs and realize they can do nothing; fortunately in this case things can still be done at a higher level that's open to contributions. And that's why people stick with Linux desktop even if it has a lot to improve.

[xen0n]

Funny thing is, the patch actually didn't mention NVIDIA at all. It's strictly an improvement to the generic case where the low-level-provided presentation time is useless; it helps NVIDIA because NVIDIA blob falls under the generic (read: useless) case.

[CochainComplex]

shouldn't it say "X.Org spending 75% of its time blocked by NVIDIA"?

[ix900]

Users may not feel the pain of running closed stacks, until they hit bugs and realize they can do nothing; fortunately in this case things can still be done at a higher level that's open to contributions. And that's why people stick with Linux desktop even if it has a lot to improve.

Most users can't do squat and most people already have stuff on their plate to be playing around with something that should be working. Open source drivers have a lot of bugs. Mesa has about 2k open and some of those aren't great. If the open source driver works well for you and what you do or use then great.

Personally, I'm very happy that there's an alternative.

[CochainComplex]

Most users can't do squat and most people already have stuff on their plate to be playing around with something that should be working. Open source drivers have a lot of bugs. Mesa has about 2k open and some of those aren't great. If the open source driver works well for you and what you do or use then great.

Personally, I'm very happy that there's an alternative.

The Problem with closed source is that you don't even know how many bugs it has.... and bug reporting is also not always open so maybe software in general has a lot of bugs?