NVIDIA Driver Developer Discusses Linux Graphics 317
An anonymous reader writes "Andy Ritger, who leads the NVIDIA UNIX Graphics Team responsible for creating drivers on Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris, has answered many questions at Phoronix about the state of Linux graphics, gaming, and drivers. Ritger shares some interesting facts, such as: the Linux graphics driver download rate is 0.5% that of their Windows driver downloads at NVIDIA.com; how the Nouveau developers are doing an incredible job; creating an AMD-like open-source strategy at NVIDIA would be time intensive and unlikely; and development problems for the Linux platform. Also commented on are new features that may come to their Linux driver within the next twelve months." Like all stories at Phoronix, in common with most other hardware review sites, this one is arbitrarily and maddeningly spread across 8 pages.
Nvidia facing obsolescence (Score:5, Interesting)
Both Intel and AMD own their own respective graphics chipset. Intel, AFAIK, developed their own integrated graphics chipset, mostly, and AMD purchased ATI.
Both Intel and AMD support the free software community far better than Nvidia. Both Intel and AMD are racing to integrate video graphics into their respective CPUs. With the graphics chip integrated into the CPU, Nvidia gets locked out.
Nvidia's only remaining market niche, as I see, is extremely high end graphics. Intel's and AMD's graphic offering, at the moment, lag Nvidia's, somewhat. Someone who needs all the rendering power they could get would not have Linux support as a major bullet point, as I see. They'll be quite content to using Nvidia's drivers on either Windows or Linux, depending on their software, with Nvidia's nature as a binary blob under Linux being of little concern. That's the only market niche I see remaining for Nvidia. Both AMD's and Intel's product lines, although not as powerful as Nvidia's, are perfectly fine for the average user and/or gamer. With out of the box support in current Linux distros for Intel's hardware (mostly already the case today), or AMD's hardware (eh, maybe tomorrow), Nvidia's outlook there is not too bright.
Linux Driver. (Score:2, Interesting)
0.5 percent well if thats the only matrix they go by,then every distro should make you download it from there each time you install.
Dont include it any more.
Re:I don't wanna see their "pubic" documentation.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally I will withhold judgement until I know who exactly will be releasing the information. It just might [wikimedia.org] become something that you do want to see.
Re:There's only two questions that matter (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure the radeon/radeonhd drivers are in need of help, but most radeon developement is being done by two non-ATI guys.
Sure the 3D rendering is behind the blobs, but not that far behind [1] [freedesktop.org]
And the 2D drivers are faster [phoronix.com]
And in my experience way more stable (outside of KMS issues i have had 0 crashes under radeon, the same could not be said for catalyst or nvidia drivers)
The reality is that for everyday use*, ATI cards now work out of the box on linux with rock solid stability this is not the case for nvidia, and it's just a matter of time till the 3D support catches up with nvidia's and firmly place ATI cards as #1 choice for Linux users (if its not already)
*call me old fashioned, but i don't consider compositing [botchco.com] part of that.
And don't forget the NVidia non-user base (Score:1, Interesting)
I use a Thinkpad T61 laptop computer running Ubuntu. Now when I bought it, there were two configurations available: a nicer one (higher screen resolution) that I really wanted, that used NVidia graphics, and a less-nice one (lower resolution) that I could live with, that used Intel graphics. But, there was a free (with source code) driver for the Intel version and not for the NVidia version. So I bought the Intel version. The lack of source code for the NVidia chip drove not just a download decision, but a purchase decision.
Of course the the ratio sucks. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:There's only two questions that matter (Score:1, Interesting)
That's capitalism. (Speculation: some of their binary code dynamically optimizes an FPGA on board for better performance.)
Capitalism would also be other parties reverse engineering the binary. Of course, 'capitalists' like this routinely deny the 'capitalistic' process by getting laws passed that outlaw this. So much for competition, a core component of capitalism.
If it's in an FPGA then move the secretbits to the damn chip, or its bios firmware. keep it out of the drivers.