Free NVIDIA Fermi Cards To Open-Source Developers

[blackiwid]

It?s, ok to tell me that you are a Nvidia fanboy, I did read again my post and did not find any mistakes except maybe some misusage of Big or Small first-letters, that?s maybe because I am not a native, I think it?s a bit cheap to asult somebody because it?s english thats maybe not perfekt. I do use opensource browser but not firefox, I use epiphany, and if It had a spell-checker it would be set to german.

If you are happy with a closed source drivers be my guest and use Nvidia hardware. But to write a hole opensource driver against a company for free, when all the competitors support the free software developers mit specs and manpower to make free drivers I think is stupid. In the past, there was no choice, you had mainly the same closed philosophy on both sides, so boykott or not writing opensource drivers against all vendors only would have weakend linux. But to only support a compony which goes open half-way and support a vendor which does not the same with nealy analog opensource support is not the right signal in my opinion.

The only "inovation" Nvidia did in the last years was software-innovation, software and standards should be fully open (not only to use them, also to define them and where they goes). When you argue that technologies like cuda (I think you mean that) are good stuff, I could argue that MS ooxml have "features" that the competitor format maybe does not have, and so microsoft is a innovativ.

[MartjeB]

While I appreciate your enthusiasm for team red I prefer to support and buy good hardware. I encourage you to look at the lowest level details of the engineering between the two camps and once you're really informed come back and tell others what to do. Nvidia is pushing innovation, but what has team red done in the past couple years?

My god, the ignorance. ATi/AMD try to push open standard as much as they can. NVidia solely develops closed-source and closed standard products.

Futhermore; Good hardware? AMD's 5xxx series are excellent. Way better than the NVidia hardware when you compare both.

1. Cheaper
2. Less energy consumption
3. Better scaling (CF / SLI)
4. Better ? / performance ratio

Has Nvidia done *anything* apart from rebranding, the pas two years?

[codestr0m]

Lets unit on a making spell checkers better

What I don?t get is why people are working so hard to make a opensource driver against Nvidias will. Let?s unite and lets buy all AMD cards instead and consentrate development of that driver with no support from Nvidia. If there is a very good free driver for amd hardware, Nvidia gets more under pressure with the last few flopping series of there cards they are under heavy presure at the moment, somedays they can not ignore 1-5% of the market like they did till now.

While I appreciate your enthusiasm for team red I prefer to support and buy good hardware. I encourage you to look at the lowest level details of the engineering between the two camps and once you're really informed come back and tell others what to do. Nvidia is pushing innovation, but what has team red done in the past couple years?

Did you even write that post with an open source browser? Firefox has a built-in spell checker on most platforms.. Hmm.. makes me wonder if you really care about open source or just lazy. The point is that sometimes you have to go the extra mile to make something of high quality..

[blackiwid]

What I don?t get is why people are working so hard to make a opensource driver against Nvidias will. Let?s unite and lets buy all AMD cards instead and consentrate development of that driver with no support from Nvidia. If there is a very good free driver for amd hardware, Nvidia gets more under pressure with the last few flopping series of there cards they are under heavy presure at the moment, somedays they can not ignore 1-5% of the market like they did till now.

[Daniel Fraga]

Given the power consumption of those horrid monsters, you can NOT call this "free". Those beasts will run you broke just in electricity costs!

Absolutely true

[codestr0m]

Lets be honest about the size of the linux desktop market share

Agree...and perhaps this is a signal to nvidia to be a little more open if they want to keep their market share

The linux marketshare for gaming if I'm not mistaken is pretty small. I believe this is where most of the money in graphics was made. (I could be wrong as I'm not familiar with that market) I do know Nvidia has invested a huge amount into R&D and everything else to bring Fermi and previous cards to light. I don't blame them for being a bit paranoid about releasing the details. I think instead of getting caught up or pushing open source on them we're just trying to kick their ass on performance and gain the support of larger customers. Then and only then will we have a voice. To do this we need more help from open source developers..

[Delgarde]

Companies frequently do charity, but the lack of visibility could sometimes lead those not looking in the right places to miss it.

That, and a tendency of many to see corporate charity as nothing but an attempt to buy good press.

Which may often be true, but those people forget that corporations are run by humans, who may have genuinely charitable reasons for what they do. It's not *always* a cynical attempt to exploit the masses...

[codestr0m]

Why open drivers are important

Must be PathScale sees open Linux drivers as beneficial to them even though nVidia themselves do not. Companies rarely do charity.

Companies frequently do charity, but the lack of visibility could sometimes lead those not looking in the right places to miss it. Regardless of that I will say there's strong benefit to us and hopefully everyone with Nvidia hardware for what we're trying to accomplish. We realize these cards are relatively expensive still and that getting them in the hands of eager developers could help bolster work for not only Fermi but all Nvidia cards. I should also note that we have pre-alpha compute drivers for OpenSolaris and FreeBSD. Our focus is open source and not just Linux. Open source drivers may not drive revenue, but I think it'll help us deliver a higher quality product. Mostly, I'm just sick of my Nvidia drivers crashing on OpenSolaris and can't wait to send a patch to fix it (jk)

[DeepDayze]

Must be PathScale sees open Linux drivers as beneficial to them even though nVidia themselves do not. Companies rarely do charity.

Agree...and perhaps this is a signal to nvidia to be a little more open if they want to keep their market share

[nanonyme]

And along with the hands off approach including not providing any assistance nor hindering the project nVidia is going to be on the short end of the stick.

At least PathScale is doing a service helping out the nouveau developers with this project

Must be PathScale sees open Linux drivers as beneficial to them even though nVidia themselves do not. Companies rarely do charity.