What Do You Want From NVIDIA's Next Driver?

[bono8106]

Forgot this:

1.1) sync to vblank/pageflip ioctl or whatever its called to support tear-free video - even though this option is present today, this does not work for me at present. the ati kms driver gets this right on lucid - dragging windows/playing video are completely tear-free with ati kms

[kraftman]

Actually that's the Linux kernel's fault. It's completely unoptimized for desktop computers. I know this because the problem happens with both nVidia and AMD cards. It happens to pretty much everyone, but most people don't notice it or don't care.

What an idiotic bull. Those are graphics drivers faults! Both - nvidia, ati binary blobs have slow 2D, 2D is still far from perfect using Radeon Open Source driver too and using KMS it's even worse right now.

[W3ird_N3rd]

Powermizer never worked on my 9500GT. nVidia tool says there is only 1 performance level which is level zero which is top speed. That's just stupid. I hope that gets fixed.

[birdie]

Powermizer never worked on my 9500GT. nVidia tool says there is only 1 performance level which is level zero which is top speed. That's just stupid. I hope that gets fixed.

Most likely it's because your BIOS has no power profiles, dump/open your BIOS in NiBiTor.

[MighMoS]

KMS and Randr 1.2 at least.

[parityboy]

Late to this, but I suppose my opinion is as valid as anyone else's

Basic stuff: KMS, XRandR, proper thermal controls, decent 2D and compositing performance.

More advanced stuff: non-SLI requirement for their Eyefinity equivalent, OpenCL, Xen support (yes please!!!, including pass-through for a second card), and a native Direct3D implementation alongside the OpenGL one.

[Porter]

Most likely it's because your BIOS has no power profiles, dump/open your BIOS in NiBiTor.

How is the BIOS related? The 9500GT is a stand-alone card. Mine has the same problem.

[Porter]

My #1 desire for the next nvidia driver...

Would be for nvidia-settings to properly parse xorg.conf files, and not freak out when a section is missing.

And if it still can't parse, at least give the user a useful error message, with some hint as to how to fix it.

[dagger]

How is the BIOS related? The 9500GT is a stand-alone card. Mine has the same problem.

nVidia driver has problem with ACPI - they publicly confirmed that few months ago, but aren't willing to fix it. Also same bug causes driver to crash when you're on battery (usually after a minute or two).

[Porter]

My #1 desire for the next nvidia driver...

Would be for nvidia-settings to properly parse xorg.conf files, and not freak out when a section is missing.

And if it still can't parse, at least give the user a useful error message, with some hint as to how to fix it.

Nevermind... looks like they finally fixed it. That's great.



OK then... the other huge deficiency in the Nvidia proprietary driver is the lack of a framebuffer driver for fbdev. Please, please please, package a simple framebuffer driver so that fully graphical boot and console are possible without changing into and out of different drivers.

Currently on Ubuntu 10.04 it seems the only decent way to make the display work properly when not in X is to load uvesafb with a fixed display mode declared in the kernel load line in grub. It works, but then when gdm and X get rolling, it has to hand over to the Nvidia X driver. It's functional in a basic way but not ideal, and most users are clueless on how to configure that sort of thing.

Ideally, an nvidia-native framebuffer driver would be able to autodetect the native display resolution and set itself automatically, so a visually correct graphical console could be used on different displays at different times without manual reconfiguration.

Framebuffer support please? Thanks Nvidia!