NVIDIA Updates Its Linux Legacy Driver For GeForce 6/7 GPUs

[Panix]

My impression from this is same old story from AMD. They don't support Linux, open driver or not. Even the binary blob should work since they use Windows code but it's not the first time I read that it's unpredictable in Windows - meaning, it is not sure to work. I have read of Windows users complain about driver support regarding AMD. You expect Linux drivers to be good?

So, you cannot even use the binary drivers which should at least give full functionality of the card and decent performance. Yet, it's supposedly more buggy than open drivers?

If your choice is between open and okay performance but many lacking features and often bugs vs fglrx (just a mess?) which is not reliable, then it stands to reason that people will take nvidia since they invest a bit more even though they don't offer a decent free driver (and let the community support that). It's a shame but some ppl just want their cards to work without much trouble.

Maybe I'll get an AMD card for fun/kicks some day but from reading here, it sounds like it's a headache and probably many features not working or displaying bugs.

[Gusar]

One of my boxes has a GeForce 4 and NVidia some time ago showed me a middle finger.
Free drivers rulez!

EDIT: Nouveau lit my 1366x768 monitor with no troubles, in NVidia's prop. driver it was really a hassle to configure.

Since we're sharing anecdotes...

I too have a box with a Geforce 4. Nouveau does not work well with it, this is the bug I'm hitting: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=54587. The blob works great however. I had to install xorg-server-1.12, which is the last version supported by the now end-of-life legacy branch for Geforce 4, but other than that no problems.

[Mat2]

One of my boxes has a GeForce 4 and NVidia some time ago showed me a middle finger.
Free drivers rulez!

EDIT: Nouveau lit my 1366x768 monitor with no troubles, in NVidia's prop. driver it was really a hassle to configure.

[deanjo]

First part: I guess contributing to the open source driver is much more than what nvidia does. Nvidia can stop anytime. The open source driver will live on no matter what happens to AMD. This is the real legacy support in my opinion, they place control into the hands of the users.

The open driver can also fall into a state of unmaintained mode and even dropped from mainline. This has happened with other open drivers. Same pitfall, if someone qualified isn't around or willing to maintain them, then they fall off the bus. Nvidia does support their products well past the point where there are a number of people still using them. That trend has always been the case since nvidia started putting out blobs for *nix.

[johnc]

It's been a long time since the OGL 2.0 days.

The root of it is that developers target the consoles and couldn't care less about PC gaming.

[gamerk2]

Mantle is an API that derived from console's but is not the same,
XboxOne uses DirectX and Direct3D and/or custom to hardware
PS4 uses from what I know OpenGL and/or custom

Mantle is a mid-level API specific to a single GPU architecture. It is NOT a low level API, and can not deliver the types of performance gains a low-level API can offer.
XB1 uses a form of DX11 tailored to the HW/SW stack of the XB1.
The PS4 uses a form of OpenGL ES as its high level graphics API, but also sports a libgcm library for low-level HW access. For performance, using libgcm is preferred over PSGL.

So you are starting to create an ecosystem that looks like this:

Windows: Mantle, OpenGL, or DirectX
OSX/BSD/Linux: OpenGL
XB1: DirectX
PS4: OpenGL ES (PSGL) or libgcm

NVIDIA: OpenGL or DirectX
AMD: Mantle, OpenGL, or DirectX

You are fast getting to the point where we are going to return to the days where different API's/Vendors support different feature sets. Remember the days where Glide offered the highest quality level, DirectX supported lower detail but higher resolutions, and OpenGL had the lowest resolution but advanced graphical features? We're going back to that. And that's not good for the ecosystem as a whole.

All this goes back to the failure to significantly update OpenGL back in the 2.0 days.

[curaga]

http://www.youcpu.com/en/compare/AMD-Turion-X2-Dual-Core-Mobile-Processor-RM-72/AMD-Quad-Core-A4-Series-APU-for-Notebooks-A4-5000-APU-with-Radeon-HD-8330

The older k8 wins in single-threaded Cinebench, but loses in most other tests, and uses 35W vs 15W :P

[Sonadow]

If you look for the more powerfull CPU your choice is almost always Intel.
If you look for the more powerful and best supported GPU on any platoform, that's almost always NVIDIA/CUDA.

Pretty much the truth.

Just for the record, i was playing with a Kabini notebook (A4-5000 iirc) i borrowed from a colleague. Slapped on Fedora 20 on it to see how kernel 3.11, mesa 9.2.3 and radeonsi would play on it. The result: GPU locks up within an hour of boot. And the A4's CPU cores are so slow my 6 yr old RM-72 runs faster than it. Catalyst causes GNOME to refuse to start up all. So I am stuck with the open drivers and an hour of computing time before the GPU locks up and i have to hard reboot the notebook.

(And yet, all is fine and dandy in Windows + Catalyst).

[Aleve Sicofante]

If you aren't interested in games, you're OK with any GPU

That's a gross oversimplification. Video, photography, animation, modeling, GPGPU and a few other areas that aren't games benefit greatly from the right GPU and that's very rarely AMD. As much as I wished the most open of the two would win, AMD just fails at providing the industry the right hardware and drivers on any platform, especially Linux. (And no, not just so called "professional" graphics cards are used in those areas I've mentioned. Albeit even the professional range of graphics cards is usually better from Nvidia than AMD.)

If you look for the more powerfull CPU your choice is almost always Intel.
If you look for the more powerful and best supported GPU on any platoform, that's almost always NVIDIA/CUDA.

I'm an AMD fan because I'm always an underdog fan (who isn't?). When AMD's CPUs where more or less equal to Intel in terms of performance, I always chose AMD. Today it takes a real fanatic to choose AMD for CPUs, except for some very specific server builds. In my experience Nvidia has always been better than Ati/AMD. I've never played a single PC game in my entire (and long) life.

[rikkinho]

well

The 4850, 6970, and 4890 are all known to have issues; maybe not for good reasons, but valid ones. The 6770m and 5770 should work just fine - I have a 5750 and I get very little problems and haven't for the past 3 years. I've used catalyst for about half the time and I'm currently using open source drivers with very little issues. The only thing that bothers me right now is no crossfire support with the open source drivers (I own 2 5750s). At this point your APU should work just fine.

If you didn't use the drivers supplied by your distro, you're bound to get more issues too.

I'm not an advocate for AMD GPUs - in the windows world, I think they're right on par with nvidia. It just depends on your workload. But for Linux I've always felt nvidia was the best choice since I first started using it in 2007. However, it will only be a matter of time until I no longer think nvidia is the best choice. The radeon drivers are catching up, fast.

amd 6770m is not supported for windows only way you can bring new drivers is used modded ones (i don't know this when i buy suck thing ofc) opensource driver works for 5770 no doubt but only works since kernel 3.11 with dpm, before that you burn your card

my wish for amd drivers give up from fglrx fired the devs and hired some more to opensource driver