Originally posted by GreatEmerald
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NVIDIA PR Responds To Torvalds' Harsh Words
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Originally posted by GreatEmerald View PostYes, they are a bit overdue with dropping support for their cards, aren't they? I expect that by next year, all cards older than the 200 series will be dropped from active support. They already dropped support twice for older hardware, after all.
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This has been interesting to learn about.
I was unaware of the licensing issues between the binary Blobs and the Linux kernel.
I was also not aware that Nvidia might not be supporting Wayland. Or at least very slow to.
I'm not opposed to using blobs, but I understand the importance of even having the mere open-source drivers exist now (which I didn't before).
I'll probably avoid Nvidia now only on the basis of that future support might be terrible. Which could be an over-reaction on my part.
Right now I'm about to buy a new computer (on a budget and buy a graphics card later... maybe). I was really on the ropes between buying a new AMD Trinity APU + Ati or Ivy Bridge + Nvidia.
But after reading all these comments and links I've decided on getting an AMD Trinity APU.
AMD could be slow to support Wayland in the Blob; I'll have an Ok open source driver to fall back on. I'll also have the chance to use Crossfire if/when that gets put in when I'm not happy with the speed of games. I was going to get Intel Ivy bridge but I want to do some decent gaming without discrete graphics card even though Mesa is pretty solid for Intels IGP. I think AMD will improve faster in its Blobs and open-source though I could day overly optimistic about AMD also.
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Originally posted by deanjo View PostNa the farthest back I can see them dropping support for is back to the FX series (GF 5). G92 era cards are still out there in abundance and have compute capabilities and their current driver easily handles GF6+ cards.
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Originally posted by johnc View PostThe chart you posted... the GPU market distribution has nothing to do with open vs closed drivers, as 99% of that market doesn't even have access to open drivers.
He is referring to the advantages of IGPs.
What advice would you give to NVIDIA, who have no chance of creating an IGP in the x86 space?
And no, I don't expect people to write better drivers. Just kidding; heared of the company that makes faster than CUDA, CUDA-only drivers?
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And don't tell me that lousily combined with ARM, this uber nVidia CPU can't be done. In fact: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTA3OTI
Yes, you blob fans can start begging nVidia for that documentation, starting from now on ;-)
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Originally posted by ChrisXY View PostTry how easy it is rotating one of the screens.
Originally posted by ChrisXY View PostEven with open source radeon's nearly opengl3.0 you can play skyrim or crysis2. Lack of support for OpenGL extensions is bad but not as bad as you think.
You could use AMD graphics closed source driver fglrx, but then you also run into drivers that are short on features compared to Windows drivers.
Originally posted by ChrisXY View PostIf the nvidia driver was open source your vdpau problem would most probably already be fixed and you wouldn't have had to wait for years even for xrandr support. If the flash plugin was open source the color palette switching problem with vdpau would be fixed already. Closed Source software is good for a company to protect whatever "secret" knowledge they need to protect but it is bad for everybody else.
No it is bad for a company to keep the product protected like graphic cards. If nVidia does open up their products, there will be no competition. AMD opens up their graphic products, but only a small amount. AMD does not tell the developers how anti-aliasing works for their graphic cards and many other features. Open source developers for Radeon can only see just the hardware. There are a lot things happening in software that AMD also likes to keep secret. Graphic cards are VLIW processor type, so both AMD and nVidia keeps a lot of compiler magic to make their video cards perform fast. What I mean "compiler magic" is not at the time compiling the driver, but compiling the data (OpenGL, DirectX, OpenCL, CUDA) in code that VLIW understands. I think eventually, the open source developers for Radeon graphics may have to create a project that deals with VLIW compiler separately to get the performance of the open source driver up to the performance that the close source drivers or fglrx.
nVidia is not a non-profitable company. nVidia is a business that is doing it for a profit, but they are doing it ethically. nVidia is still in business, so this means there is competition and then competition lowers prices and finally further improvement for graphic cards. AMD is not different. You just have to understand about businesses then you get why they do what they do.
I have not upgraded my nVidia drivers, so VDPAU might be fixed in 295.49 or the next stable release stated by the Gentoo community.
FYI, nVidia does add features to their video cards like 30-bit color to my aging GeForce8 8400M GS even though open source programs does not support these amount of colors.
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