NVIDIA's Oldest Legacy Driver Will Not Gain New Support

[mugginz]

As I stated previously, I feel that AMD and NVIDIA are at approximately the same level when it comes to the blob drivers......

Tell that to my 9800GT and HD 5870. They wouldn't agree with that statement and neither would I.

(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.

For someone wanting to use wine then at the moment I'd say nVidia's the best choice when results are what matters regardless of the technical issues at hand.

That said, for those after only open source 3D then clearly ATI is the better choice and see nothing wrong with people saying so but I don't see how it's fair to extrapolate that into the context of high performance closed source drivers.

If you want to use open drivers, buy ATI
If you want to use closed ones, buy nVidia.

[FunkyRider]

So you guys enjoyed the flame fest?

Here's some more points:

1. Installing NVidia binary driver is not hard, you guys who claim it to be hard to do, DON'T USE LINUX! cuz' it's definitely gonna be too hard for your intelligence

2. FGLRX drivers, anyone, who have never encountered problems withit: fluid compiz desktop, tear free window animation, tear free stutter free video playback, no locking, games running fine, X start/stop fine, VT switching fine, please say your name below! I would like to see who is the luckiest man in the world. Perhaps you should go buy lotto now, that's definitely going to be able to fund you buying a new video card and your struggle financial situations.

Buy the way, I'm not some BS accounting company employee. I work with Boeing thank you very much.

[jbrown96]

Your motherboard should work with any recent Fedora out of the box, with no tinkering needed, with full OpenGL 2.0 support. Open drivers support it.

I believe you when you say that it didn't work for you, but do understand that it's not the typical case.

It does work. I'm actually very happy with the stability and the resilience to distro updates (obviously since it's part of the kernel).

I'm very unhappy with the performance. It's completely unacceptable with Kwin effects. Since this is a workstation, I can't have X breaking, ever. Furthermore, I really like Fedora 13. Both of these considerations remove the possibility of running FGLRX, which I think shows that ATI's drivers are simply "not good."

I used to have problems with Nvidia on my laptop, especially with suspend. However, I haven't had any problems with my Quadro 570m since Ubuntu 10.04 was released. Besides their installer, Nvidia's drivers are spectacular.

[pingufunkybeat]

Your motherboard should work with any recent Fedora out of the box, with no tinkering needed, with full OpenGL 2.0 support. Open drivers support it.

I believe you when you say that it didn't work for you, but do understand that it's not the typical case.

[jbrown96]

BULL.... SHIT...


Realy? nVidia doesn't break with new X.org releases? Funny... If not then why do they even update their driver to work with later X.org versions?

It was taking four to five seconds to minimize/maximize windows. That's unusable, and the problem went away as soon as I disable it. As I said earlier, if it's not out-of-the-box or very close to it, then I don't care. There are probably easy workarounds, but I'm not going to do them, particularly because a "five minute" workaround is hardly ever that.

ATI's X-server/kernel support lags months behind the software release. For example X-server 1.8.0. It was released April 6th. Nvidia announced support for 1.8.0 with driver 195.36.24 around April 27th (I couldn't find a specific day, but Linux Today has a story dated the 27th). ATI still has no support. There's a huge difference between less than one month lag and at least three months.
I haven't found any specific links, but as I recall, Nvidia supported 2.6.34 before it was released.
There's two comparisons that I think are reasonable: FGLRX vs. Nvidia and Radeon vs. Nvidia.
If you take the first one, then Nvidia wins across the board. The only situation where Nvidia is worse is with their installer, which I agree is terrible. However, on Ubuntu (and I assume many other distros), the package manager provides a first-class experience.
The second comparison is only a serious discussion if one really values free software. I think it's obvious where I stand: I like things that work without tinkering; yet, I understand the FOSS argument.

In the end, FGLRX is terrible and in no way compares to Nvidia. Radeon is an ideological argument...

[V!NCENT]

I have had to disable Kwin's effects or the graphics are too slow to do anything, and I'm talking about workstation use, not video playback.

BULL.... SHIT...

I used to spend a lot of time configuring my systems and working around all kinds of problems, graphics and others. However, I've outgrown that. I'm sick and tired of changing my use patterns to meet the shortcomings of software and hardware. I feel like Nvidia doesn't force me to make these decisions, but ATI does.

Realy? nVidia doesn't break with new X.org releases? Funny... If not then why do they even update their driver to work with later X.org versions?

[jbrown96]

You clearly have NO IDEA what "out of the box" means.

It means that you put your distro's install disk in, press "next" until it is installed, and it "works".

Out of the box does NOT involve taking extra steps to install and debug proprietary blobs. If you have to press ONE SINGLE BUTTON beyond installing the disto, then you are beyond the box.

And yes, AMD chips ***DO*** work ***VERY CONSISTENTLY*** out of the box with Fedora. There is ZERO lag for kernel/xserver support since they DO NOT release a new version or update of/to Fedora without updating the radeon driver to match its package set. In fact, RedHat, which basically CONTROLS Fedora is one of the two primary developers for AMD drivers. The other being AMD itself. In other words, the AMD support tends to hit Fedore BEFORE it hits anywhere else, and yes, it ***JUST WORKS***. No blobs required.

You are right that the opensource drivers work out of the box for Fedora. That's why I use them. Whereas, FGLRX (and Nvidia in the past) caused many problems with day-to-day patches, the opensource drivers have been very resilient in this respect. However, they don't work well. I have had to disable Kwin's effects or the graphics are too slow to do anything, and I'm talking about workstation use, not video playback. The drivers work, but not in the way that I want them to. I use Ubuntu on my laptop (probably will switch to F13 soon, since it's such a great release), and there was a popup once I installed to add the proprietary Nvidia drivers. I haven't had to mess with it at all after that; Ubuntu has done a good job of packaging the good Nvidia drivers, and kernel changes haven't caused any problems.
I'm sure I can get Kwin working on Fedora, but honestly, it's not worth the time. It's just disappointing.

The last experience with FGLRX that I had was so poor that I don't ever want to use it again. Some time in the past FGLRX got a great feature to allow me to graphical change the overscan for my HDTV. It was awesome, and something that I hadn't been able to figure out with FGLRX or Nvidia before that. However, with 10.3 or 10.4, FGLRX stopped recognizing my TV as a TV. I posted on the forums here, and after many replies, no one could figure out what was wrong. It was less work to encode 1TB of video to play on my PS3 than to continue to mess with FGLRX every release. And since the kernel/X-server support is so poor, driver updates are frequently required just to keep up with distro upgrades.

I used to spend a lot of time configuring my systems and working around all kinds of problems, graphics and others. However, I've outgrown that. I'm sick and tired of changing my use patterns to meet the shortcomings of software and hardware. I feel like Nvidia doesn't force me to make these decisions, but ATI does.

[mirv]

Go travel around some of the northern interior mining locations of Australia without air-con, now that's bad!
Being on a legacy driver thread (I smell a pun coming on here), internal car electronics and communications is something that really doesn't change much - although recently there's been quite a good deal of effort into introducing more modern systems (read up on flexray and autosar).
Will linux one day be running your car's internals? Now there's an interesting discussion - and one where "bad drivers" has a whole new meaning.

[V!NCENT]

The rest...
1) Where? GM's new "electric" car still burns fossil fuels.

Oh for the love of God keep up...

3) You don't need to stinkin seat belt if you're driving an army tank that can crush through everything in its way.

If you have that kind of money them buy a helicopter so you won't crash into anything at all... Geez...

4, 5, 6, 10, 11) causes BAD DRIVERS who can't actually drive well/safely.

Sure... I'm sure it's bad that when some manic comes from the right with massive speeds of 120 km/h and you need to brake on a rainy day that ABS is BS. What about snow? Probably bad. Trackion controll is also totally useless in this day and age where certain cars can deliver 750 brake horse power and you do not want to accelerate your car after you stopped from the traffic light.

7) Wuss.
8) Its in my phone.
9) kills more than it saves.
12) Wuss.

Oh, FYI: 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 are all COMPUTER advancements....

Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah... Computer enhancements. Fine. Internet is also a computer enhancement so let's scrap that too as an inovation. All enhancements. But no it doesn't matter if it's controlled by a computer; it is not a computer performing it and it has anything to do with stability and safety which is why it is awesome. Also bluemotion? Never heared of that? Engine stops when the car is in standstill? No invention whatsoever either? C'mon give me a braik... Next thing you tell me is that flying cars are the only innovation and the rest is BS.

[V!NCENT]

#2: Is this the area within the tinfoil car where you are guaranteed to become crippled if you get in a crash?

Hahahahahahaha xD

To tell you the truth I don?t know what they call it in English xD Ripple zones maybe?

You know when you perform a frontal crash on a lovely tree, the forfront of you car (where the engine is if you do not have the money for a Porche), it absorbs the impact by crippling/ripple-ing...

WTF xD