On Tuesday 20 April 2004 12:59, adam@thebowery.co.uk wrote:
I would have thought the lesson learned would be don't use Gentoo or buy an Nvidia card to use with Linux :)
Can't argue with the first bit, as I haven't really spent a lot of time playing with Gentoo.
But
If you want/need functional 3D with comparative performance to a Windows system, what other options are there ?
At the moment if you buy any Nvidia card there is a reasonable chance that you can make it work, yes they are closed drivers, no it doesn't work in 100% of cases (in this case I think it was more to do with AGP support on the chipset rather than the drivers) and yes if Nvidia opened their driver spec we could have nice open source drivers, but the point is it does work.
Not all ATI cards are linux friendly, the drivers they offer are also not open and no other manufacturer I can think of can offer such performance.
If Nvidia moved some IP from the driver to the card then maybe they could open the drivers, but then we would have a more expensive card and one that probably didn't get incremental performance improvements with every driver release.
I am pretty sure that if Nvidia could open up the drivers without some huge financial or intellectual cost then they would. Why would they not, why maintain linux drivers and pay people to write installers etc when there is a community that would do it for free ?
The reason I think is that there is either a. Some clever stuff going on in the driver that they don't want competitors to see or b. Some licensed technology that they are not allowed to release.
W