NVIDIA's Oldest Legacy Driver Will Not Gain New Support

[Chad Page]

Dropping GF2 support from 9x.xx was rather arbitrary - GF4MX is based off GF2MX, which has even fewer features IIRC.

ATI dropped support for <Radeon X/HD 2xxx hardware in Windows - even now you have to download an older-model driver via Microsoft. So who knows how well it will work in Windows 8, but say Ubuntu 12.04LTS should still have good support for r3xx-5xx.

Upgrading old desktops is sometimes Harder Than You Think. If you have a 440BX or other board that requires 3.3v AGP, almost nothing new will work. You can go on eBay and fish for an early r300 card, but a faster one tends to be too expensive for such a low-value comp.

It's sad to see MGA support decline, but I guess it's to be expected.

[brent]

Read about that 3Dfx article? There you go X-)

Is that a joke? How does that affect the drivers mentioned?
The recent work on 3dfx drivers does in no way represent how old hardware support is dealt with in general.
(Also, I doubt anything useful will come out of it, but that is another matter)

So I put in a working card from the closet (Rage II+dvd IIRC). Now Why The Fsck should I have bought a new card?

GPUs this old are very slow even for everyday 2D work and drivers are outdated/unmaintained. They don't have digital outputs and cannot support high resolutions. The list goes on; it's quite simple, really.
Bad and slow IGPs, like GMA950, are far superior to "vintage" GPUs.

[Shining Arcanine]

My point is simple: If your video card is more than 10 years old, get rid of it already!

Your are just like driving a 1982 honda and bragging about how good it is. If car people are like you, there will be no more car industry. We all be satisfied with 1980's cars and just keep maintain and drive them!

If fashion industry people are like you, there will be no fashion industry because cloths from 50 years ago can also keep you warm! What's the purpose?

I guess you are not that old, try to look forward not backward, your life quality will sure be better.

Cars are different from computers. With computers, you actually have tangible improvements as years pass. With cars, there are no real improvements, other than doing things differently, which is not an improvement.

If cars did see such improvements, we would likely be driving cars that have 10,000 mpg today.

[Shining Arcanine]

Upgrading old desktops is sometimes Harder Than You Think. If you have a 440BX or other board that requires 3.3v AGP, almost nothing new will work. You can go on eBay and fish for an early r300 card, but a faster one tends to be too expensive for such a low-value comp.

I think that the idea is to replace the entire computer and not just the graphics card.

[Shining Arcanine]

Pushing the industry forward... ROFL.

So how about those KMS, vector graphics acceleration, state trackers... Yup nVidia is moving the industry forward alright, especially now that the tech industry is heading towards Linux, but I'm sure that can be overlooked...

No nVidia sucks. Their cards are as environmentaly friendly as a Ferrari is compared to a Volkswagen Polo. So they lack behind on the energyu efficiency front too. What else am I missing? Oh I know: OpenGL.

Am I missing something else here? Oh yeah ATI does both proprietary and FLOSS. Totally forgot that ATI has made extreme leaps forward from where they were in the past to where they are now with their blob.

What else am I missing? Oh yeah DirectX 11. That is moving forward considdering Windows still has the largest marketshare. What else am I missing? Oh I remember: workstation cards! What else?

Oh I know; more bang for your buck. I hope I haven't forgot about anything here...

What is your point?

[pmorph]

Nvidia does not work out of the box, it does not work at all until you install the binary driver.

Fglrx offers similar performance on new ATi hardware that the Nvidia driver does on Nvidia hardware. Not as polished maybe, but claiming that 3d does not work at all is very bold.

Which card are you talking about and when was this? What exactly does not work in everyday life?

The last ATi card I have is with the RV710 chip, bought when it was fresh on the market. IIRC, getting proper video playback out from it with fglrx was hell at the time. Also, I couldn't get it to work with two X servers running (kept crashing when switcing between them). In general, the driver seemed to have random stability problems (hard crashing) when exiting X/switching back to it.

Its still gathering dust somewhere here.. I might dig it up and try if things have gotten better since then.

[droidhacker]

But I still cannot agree with the statement that only Nvidia hardware works and other hardware does not work.

You are definitely NOT the only one who is of that opinion.

As I stated previously, I feel that AMD and NVIDIA are at approximately the same level when it comes to the blob drivers (wine users may not agree, but that is because wine is broken, not AMD), and AMD is WAY WAY ahead of nvidia when it comes to out-of-box support. In my books, that means AMD > nvidia.

Funny how things changed when ati got swallowed up eh? I remember having ati driver nightmares way back with junk like mach32, and this continued right up through R400.... so don't anyone claim bias here, it wasn't always smooth sailing and nvidia *USED* to be ahead of the game.

[droidhacker]

Nvidia does not work out of the box, it does not work at all until you install the binary driver.

I wouldn't say quite that.... *older* nvidia cards *do* work out of the box, even with 3d via nouveau. REALLY have to respect the nouveau team -- absolutely remarkable what they've accomplished the hard way.

Their new stuff though... good luck. At least evergreen gets some 2d out of the box.

[droidhacker]

Cars are different from computers. With computers, you actually have tangible improvements as years pass. With cars, there are no real improvements, other than doing things differently, which is not an improvement.

If cars did see such improvements, we would likely be driving cars that have 10,000 mpg today.

Actually, cars have gone BACKWARDS over the years. OLD cars were WAY better than the junk that the (especially US) car makers shove down our throats these days.

Just look at cars in CUBA. OLD OLD OLD American cars from < 1960... and yet SO MANY of them are still holding together. Why? Because they had a SOLID FRAME! They were built to last and last they did. The reason why you don't see as high a proportion of old cars elsewhere is that you have a wasteful economy and all the new bells and whistles tricking people into a DOWNGRADE and slowly reducing the quality and CRUSHING all the stuff that was ***ACTUALLY GOOD***.

If you're going to be in a car and run down by an 18 wheeler, what would you prefer to be in... a 1955 Chevrolet? Or a 2010 Chevrolet? The '55 will take the hit, roll over into the ditch a few times, and hold together. The 2010 will get crushed like tinfoil and you'll be dead.

Anyone remember the GM EV1? That was an honest to god electric car that GM was FORCED to make by the state of california. As soon as they stopped forcing it, GM rounded them all up and crushed them. Every last one. Now they are talking about releasing a new "electric" car -- the so-called "volt", which is nothing more than a CRAPPY plug-in hybrid.

[pingufunkybeat]

I wouldn't say quite that.... *older* nvidia cards *do* work out of the box, even with 3d via nouveau. REALLY have to respect the nouveau team -- absolutely remarkable what they've accomplished the hard way.

I do respect the work that the nouveau team is doing, but although there is 3d support, I had the impression that it's far from complete. Compiz works, but I'm not sure how well Doom3 runs on it.

And you get no powersaving. Another one of Nvidia's important secrets that you're not allowed to understand.