Don't Forget NVIDIA Is Dropping Pre-Fermi From Mainline

[ArchLinux]

Yes in 20 years maybe nouveau will have 40% of proprietary driver quality. Hopeless... Lets hope that Nvidia will keep provide excellent proprietary support.

I don't get this weird attitude and quite frankly, it's been lasting for a pretty long time. All they [the Nouveau folks] are doing is checking out how the blob modifies the memory (disassembling is, read, ILLEGAL in notable countries and the approach for both projects is too diverse). Upstream helps them with some things, but that's it. You're _never_ going to see a driver that's equal with the manufacturer's binary version with that, and if you don't like it, then forget about it and don't use it.

These are about the same people who would be complaining about nv not containing any 3D acceleration code, and that the open-source community is very unsatisfactory for not being able to provide their own version. So now that we have one you're complaining that, well, it needs to be better, else it's crap?

[Lafgura]

Because I still use them for testing...

[brosis]

So my 4850 mobility is left with POS crapalyst 12.<whatever it was> in which I got to keep all of the bugs(never fixed), the new bugs added, crap video playback, and rendering path borkeness(as in the driver enters a rrace condition or something when trying to render in some specific situations, does this under windows as well) meanwhile your "old" nVidia drivers will be in pretty good shape comparatively speaking. The only problem will be when new interfaces for display engines, e.g. under linux are needed, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if nVidia didn't perhaps cough up special releases for at least some of the older cards(i.e. more "recent" dropped ones).

Mobility hd4650 / hd5850 / X300 here, working fine with radeon opensource.

[b15hop]

LOL!!!
Maybe that's why I use the binary blob.
But yeah, nvidia has nothing to do with Nouveau open source driver. If I was going to get a card on the point of open source I would have gone with ATi anyway...

Still using my EN460GTX Love the card. It beast easily all 560 and there is no much gain against the 660gtx

So my next upgrade if i ever tend to do would be atleast 760gtx or equal.


Might try also AMD if its cheaper and they have fixed the tearing/flickering from video playback.

For this reason I went from a 460 GTX straight to a 780 GTX. And you know what? STILL very little gain. Most games are crappy ports from console anyway so what to expect. I'm talking about windows games here too where I would expect them to SCREAM on the 780... but nup... I feel like it's almost like the old card pretty much in every game. Same games are so badly ported that they are choppy even on the 780... And that's saying something.

[cutterjohn]

They are dropping the legacy support very early now.
I have a Geforce 4 and it was supported till uUbuntu 12.04 (for over 10 years).

Still better than AMD(ATI). They dropped 4XXX support after c. 2y.

On the plus side with both of them mixing old GPUs w/new GPUs in "new" product lines that'll likely mean more than 2y of support, although I suspect in nVidia's case that they just wanted to dump all the crufty code to support VERY old GPUs out of the current drivers.

So my 4850 mobility is left with POS crapalyst 12.<whatever it was> in which I got to keep all of the bugs(never fixed), the new bugs added, crap video playback, and rendering path borkeness(as in the driver enters a rrace condition or something when trying to render in some specific situations, does this under windows as well) meanwhile your "old" nVidia drivers will be in pretty good shape comparatively speaking. The only problem will be when new interfaces for display engines, e.g. under linux are needed, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if nVidia didn't perhaps cough up special releases for at least some of the older cards(i.e. more "recent" dropped ones).

[verde]

No, they don't fully support Nouveau, but it looks like they are starting to change that attitude slightly... especially when it comes to their ARM parts (which are now based on Kepler/Maxwell and can run on Nouveau).

Yes in 20 years maybe nouveau will have 40% of proprietary driver quality. Hopeless... Lets hope that Nvidia will keep provide excellent proprietary support.

[Veerappan]

I should say they don't support Nouveau.

No, they don't fully support Nouveau, but it looks like they are starting to change that attitude slightly... especially when it comes to their ARM parts (which are now based on Kepler/Maxwell and can run on Nouveau).

[Dukenukemx]

Because there are none?

I should say they don't support Nouveau.

[justmy2cents]

Drivers situation in Linux is 100% mess..

You have Nvidia that supports drivers with the same quality as Windows but as proprietary you never know when this support will end. Still absolutely the perfect choice right now for serious gaming.

You have AMD that supports only 5000 series and above (with adequate drivers) leaving the rest with TRAGIC opensource drivers that massively lack features, performance and graphics usually are wreck.

Finally you have Intel with the best drivers solution but the worst GPUs...


I have an HTPC with a RV630 (Radeon 2600 PRO) and after 2 years of hopes (from Xubuntu 11.10), yesterday I installed Windows 7 again. I have GPU again... I can play 1080p light games like Portal, HL2, FM2014 and I can stream games from my Desktop like Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider without problems.

My RV630 is 8 years old and in Linux (latest Mesa/Kernel), drivers are worst than the Windows 95 drivers.. In most games I have flickering, missing textures etc and performance wise, not even 20% of the Windows 13.9 Catalyst.

nvidia dropping support means moving that GPU to legacy driver which is then maintained for a long time. only difference is that no new features happen there.

http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3142/~/support-timeframes-for-unix-legacy-gpu-releases

and if you plan still using that GPU after 2019, yea... you're screwed

[GT220]

GeForce 6 series was released in 2004, GeForce 7 series 2005/2006. Support ends in 2017, thats 13 years for GeForce 6 and 12/11 years for GeForce 7.

GeForce 8 series was released in 2006/2007, supported until 2019. Thats another 13/12 years for reliable, dependable rock solid support. GeForce 9 series was released 2008, 11 years of support. GeForce 200 series, 2008 for the GT200, 2009 for the rest of the series, 11/10 years of support.

AMD driver support is pure garbage, not even 2 years and they've dropped Windows 8 support already. You can't rely or depend on AMD at all.

Yet stupid people slam Nvidia for no good reasons. The double standards is just unbelievable.