NVIDIA Releases New Linux Drivers

mlmitton writes "NVIDIA just released new Linux drivers (1.0-5328). But the early reports by users are less than encouraging. People are weighing in with mostly bad news about how well these new drivers work. Some people are finding that Neverwinter Nights doesn't work and they're reverting to the old drivers (4496). I spent a few long hours recently trying to get the old drivers to work with Fedora Core 1 so I'm going to hold off on these new ones."

Yay!

[Saville]

GNU/Linux gets dynamic shader compilers!
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_9292.h tml

Do these drivers export all the same extensions as their windows counter parts?

changelog

[wo1verin3]

Changes:
This release adds support for the latest GeForce FX and Quadro FX GPUs, UBB
and FSAA Stereo, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0, and GLX_SGI_swap_control,
improves XPixamp support, and reduces CPU usage when OpenGL applications
are syncing to vblank.

Complete Changelog/Readme [freshmeat.net]

Good job NVIDIA

[after]

Good, they haven't updated the Linux drivers for a while.

I am happy to see that NVIDIA is even supporting Linux, unlike some Microsoft-only "partners" that do not care for Professor Joe.

I also like that they include some source code, so I can change what I want. However, I would like to see the full source code to the drivers (???, sorry if I am wrong here) just for the pleasure of how they do all the neat tricks they do.

Good job NVIDIA, thanks for the drivers.

Re:Good job NVIDIA

[VertigoAce]

My linux box is back in my dorm room, but I think the nvidia drivers are mostly closed source. They use an opensource wrapper just to comply with the GPL. This generally lets you fix problems that occur with some kernel updates (if a header file changes or something similar), but nothing particularly useful as far as the graphics go.

Re:Good job NVIDIA

[ncc74656]

My linux box is back in my dorm room, but I think the nvidia drivers are mostly closed source. They use an opensource wrapper just to comply with the GPL.

I just had a run-in with a driver that demonstrates why an open-source driver is much preferred. Until now, I've not had reason to tweak driver source to get something working.

Over the past few days, I've been setting up a MythTV [mythtv.org] box on a spare machine. This machine is equipped with a Radeon VE clone (built by FIC, IIRC) with S-video/composite output. I grabbed the GATOS [sourceforge.net] driver source, built that, and got the TV-out jack working great...

...until I moved the computer from the bedroom to the living room and tried firing it up with just the TV plugged in.

The X server detected that nothing was plugged into the VGA port and said "no video for you!" Isolating the offending code and fixing it so it'll work with just the TV-out jack in use was just a few minutes' work. (The patch was posted to the gatos-devel mailing list, if anybody's interested.)

If the driver supplied by nVidia for its cards exhibited the same behavior (since I don't have any of their cards at home, I can't say if they do), what would you do? Lash up some sort of dongle to fool the card into thinking a monitor is plugged in, and hope you don't blow up your card? That doesn't sound like much of a plan.

Re:Good job NVIDIA

[Trbmxfz]

They use an opensource wrapper just to comply with the GPL

I think the reason isn't GPL compliance (after all, for many "stock" kernels, they provide a ready-to-load binary module), but rather the fact that Linux doesn't provide an ABI. This is on purpose; so as to discourage closed-source drivers.

Re:Good job NVIDIA

[skookum]

Screw wanting to see how they work, most people just want the source so that they can get it to work, period. Since they're binary only it means that they're usually tied to a specific kernel version and sometimes a specific distro. If you deviate from the path of the most popular distros you soon get into uncharted water.

They're in a catch-22: I'm sure they'd like to open the source but it's been mentioned before that some portions of the drivers contain licensed/proprietary code that they do not themselves control. In other words they couldn't even if they wanted to. (Plus, they seem to take drivers very seriously and might see it as giving away trade secrets to the likes of ATI, so maybe they don't even want to.)

Re:Good job NVIDIA

[jonsmirl]

Even if they have third party agreements about releasing driver source, there is nothing preventing them from releasing hardware specs and letting us write drivers. But still they don't do this.

At least ATI has released R2XX hardware specs. The R400 is just about to ship, maybe when it's out they'll release the R3XX specs.

I don't buy the argument about keeping secrets from ATI. ATI has the capability to pull apart the drivers without the source.

That's why they have patents

[anti-NAT]

Patents are intended to protect intellectual property. Nvidia shouldn't be worried about protecting it in their closed source drivers.

Actually, thinking about it, if they really need to protect their intellectual property within closed source drivers, those drivers should be encrypted, preventling disasspembly and decrypted on the fly. Hmm. That's not going to work, cause if you really wanted to find out their secrets, you'd just use a AGP bus analyser or some other similar device.

Other people may disag

Re:That's why they have patents

[Osty]

Actually, thinking about it, if they really need to protect their intellectual property within closed source drivers, those drivers should be encrypted, preventling disasspembly and decrypted on the fly. Hmm. That's not going to work, cause if you really wanted to find out their secrets, you'd just use a AGP bus analyser or some other similar device.

You're right, with a certain amount of effort whatever they're hiding in the closed source drivers can still be found and copied. However, the idea is to

I understand your POV,

[anti-NAT]

and it is the right type of thinking.

The question is though, who are they trying to protect their intellectual property from ?

For the moment, considering your example of door locks, I choose to use them, not because they make my house impenetrable, but they ensure that most, "casual" theives won't bother to break in, because the risk and / or effort is now higher than the reward. Determined thieves won't bother with trying to break the locks, they will just cut a hole in a wall, creating a new doorway.

Re:Good job NVIDIA

[Cyclops]

Not true at all. The closed portion of the nVidia drivers is only the X driver.

The kernel module is and has always been open source, and you can compile it for whatever version of the kernel you wish (assuming the kernel module interface hasn't changed drastically, of course).

This is a completely bogus statement. More than so, it's so false that it reeks of lack of either knowledge or good intentions.

In order to work around module versioning limitations or to give a chance for people with different kernels than the officially supported, nVidia provides a wrapper source that is what is compiled as a module, all the intelligence being in the binary only driver that is injected by this "open source" code.

If you are, as I hope, only talking without a clue, then it stands as one more evidence that nVidia succeeds in convincing people that they don't provide binary modules.

Go ahead and type: /sbin/lsmod

Do you like that Tainted flag? That's a signal of how "open source" that driver is.

I just hope you don't ever bother the Linux developers with weird problems on your system, specifically those involving 'oops'es and whatnot. Not only you'll be wasting their time, but also you might get silence, pity, mocking, or other reactions.

Re:Good job NVIDIA

[ag3n7]

I just hope you don't ever bother the Linux developers with weird problems on your system, specifically those involving 'oops'es and whatnot. Not only you'll be wasting their time, but also you might get silence, pity, mocking, or other reactions.

Yup, why would the developers treat him any differently than anyone else (RTFM, its not a bug, etc). :-D

Re:Good job NVIDIA

[after]

Read every ``Unsupported'' link in the Linux Hardware Compatibility HOWTO [tldp.org]

Fix

[Lord_Dweomer]

"People are weighing in with mostly bad news about how well these new drivers work. Some people are finding that Neverwinter Nights doesn't work and they're reverting to the old drivers (4496). "

Ah, this is a common problem. Renaming the NWN executable to 3Dmark.exe should fix things right up.

Explanation please.

[edalytical]

I don't get it, why is this funny?

Re:Explanation please.

[Bombcar]

There was a famous event where NVIDIA's drivers would skip some calculations based on the filename of the executable, which would result in a higher benchmark score. Search around for quack.exe for an example of this style of thing.

Re:Explanation please.

[JebusIsLord]

Actually, the quake/quack fiasco was ATI, IIRC.

Re:Explanation please.

[Bombcar]

Yah. But the story is similar, and NVidia did it with 3Dmark.exe or whatever.

mv /boot/bzImage /boot/3dMark.exe

Re:Explanation please.

[Chep]

everybody does this. ATI did it, NVDA did it, now XGI is owing [hardware.fr] many an explanation or two...

It looks like it's just the way they do business.

Me, I bought an ATI, specifically because it's supported by the XFree86 and DRI projects. No binary-only NV disaster on my PC, thanks.

From that site (as mangled by google)

[DAldredge]

Following the news concerning the bizarreries in drivers XGI, we carried out some tests by modifying the file of drivers XGI so that the applications is not recognized any more (modification of the character string 3 D m has R K 0 3. E X E in 3 D m U R K 0 3. E X E for example) since the simple renaming of file did not make it possible to circumvent detection. The results are rather impressive, since for example one passes from 20.6 fps to 8.8 fps in the scene Mother Nature of 3DMark03 (1024*768, the tot

Whoah slow down

[gantrep]

New NVidia drivers for linux? I'm still trying to get the old ones to work!!

Gee...

[JoeLinux]

and people wonder why ATI suddenly comes out ahead of NVidia. I know *I'm* getting an ATI 9800XT when I build my next system.

You know, I wish hardware manufacturers would learn that they have nothing to lose by releasing the specs on the system. We Linux users can't pirate hardware. We still have to buy it. Oh well...

Re:Gee...

[kikensei]

Yeah. Good luck. Try finding a SINGLE 9800XT/Linux success story on the Internet right now. I just sold an XT and am using the FX5900U. Flat out best gamig card for linux right now except for the 5950.

Re:Gee...

[Anonymous Coward]

now you can play those two linux games even faster!

Re:Gee...

[SQLz]

Actually, 302.

See the list! [icculus.org]

Re:Gee...

[Anonymous Coward]

We Linux users can't pirate hardware.

Speak for yourself, but don't include me in your 'we' when you infer that Linux users are 'pirates'. I don't copy software illegally as I only use Free/Open Software.

To generalise, I think you will find Linux users are very aware of software licensing and rarely copy closed source software. Rather it is proprietory software users, who don't care about freedon in software and don't care about licensing conditions, who do the copying.

Re:Gee...

[Ramadog]

We know different people. The linux people I know dual boot with their legitimate copy of windows to play games which they also acquired legally.
It is the windows people that I know run their pirate copy of windows and frequent warez site for their software needs.

Re:Gee...

[Venotar]

Ramadog,

I used to have the same expectations of Open-source users as yourself, and largely for the same reasons. Until recently, people I knew in the OSS community even paid for their OSS, given the chance. Of course, most of them never ran a Microsoft OS, either.

Upon moving to my current job, I suffered a rude awakening. The company I currenly work for is largely a Linux house, with the majority of the technical people solidly rooted in various Unices. Piracy is rampant. I was shocked at how many pe

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:ATi this time

[Enucite]

And their drivers are awsome

Obviously you don't use Linux or FreeBSD. :)

Re:Gee...

[antdude]

The driver is fine, but I wished I could use my All-In-Wonder card features like TV tuner! Also, I would love to use Linux for PVR. MythTV doesn't work with ATI's drivers. :(

I've heard a lot of problems with both companies.

[deinol]

and people wonder why ATI suddenly comes out ahead of NVidia.

Last I checked ATI didn't have the best linux support either. I have a friend with the misfortune of having the Nforce chipset motherboard and a Radeon graphics card. Good luck getting the two to work together.

Open source kernel + 1 closed source driver may work just fine. But open source kernel + 2 closed source drivers can mean conflicts and incompatability.

It doesn't help that Nvidia's precompiled agpart driver for the nforce board only sup

Re:Gee...

[dinivin]

If NVidia released their specs, not only would ATI be able to get some insight out of it, but other companies who aren't quite so advanced (like S3) could simply read the spec and skip a very significant portion of the design process for their next card.

Bull. When did nVidia purchase all the 3Dfx intellectual property? And how many generations of cards passed before they were able to incorporate this technology into their own line of cards? It's not like ATI or S3 could just grab the specs and have a

Re:Gee...

[Stiletto]

It has nothing to do with keeping source code and techniques away from the competition, although the people who decide against releasing sometimes think it is.

Many major graphics card design companies out there use similar techniques in their software. I'd be willing to bet if you compared driver source code between ATI and nVIDIA you would find many many similar techniques. There's very little they can learn from each other at this point, and what techniques _can_ be copied would take development time to _actually_ copy, introduce risk, and not give them a sizeable enough competative advantage to be worth it.

You argue that seeing the source to the driver lets a competitor "skip a very significant portion of the design process for their next card". This is absolute rubbish. The code may give them a glimpse at how the underlying hardware is put together, but this is far from what is required to design and fab a chip.

I used to work for a graphics card company, and knowing what each register does doesn't give me even 1% of the tools required to build even a _clone_ of this 4-year old chip, much less a competitor to todays chips.

The real reason, of course is what others have posted: These guys have some licensed 3rd party source in their drivers which they are not allowed to release.

As I posted in the Bioware forum...

[kikensei]

I'm working fine with the new drivers and NWN:HoTU as well as all my other games (Savage, ET). I didn't use the -update command, I downloaded the binaries from Nvidia, and it compiled for my system (slack 9.1, Dropline Gnome). No issues at all thus far and I played NWN for 3 hours today. I'm using an FX 5900U on a P4 3Ghz w/ HT disabled.

Back to via

[ActionPlant]

Looks like I'll be sticking with my KT chipset on my Linux box for a while. I have an nforce2 board I'd like to try, but this isn't the best news I've had today.

Damon,

Re:Back to via

[ActionPlant]

To clarify, yes I was talking about motherboards, and yes I realize this is for display adaptors. I was considering the built-in video and problems the new drivers may pose working within a native nforce2 environment. Anyone have any experience with this? Or should I just stick with my Radeon?

Damon,

Re:Back to via

[mroch]

I've got an nForce2 board working (almost) perfectly under Gentoo. It seems to be a timing issue... either your board wants to cooperate at the moment you install, or it doesn't. The only thing you can do is try it. If it doesn't work under whatever distro you're using, try Gentoo. They've built a bunch of nforce stuff into their kernel, so support for mine was out-of-the-box.

If you have an nforce2 board, you probably have a fast enough processor to compile most software in a relatively reasonable amount of time. If you do decide to install Gentoo, make sure you check out the alternate installation guide so you can play Tux Racer while it's building your system. :)

Re:Back to via

[ActionPlant]

That sounds pretty cool, and it's one of the distros I haven't tried yet. I'll give that a shot. Thanks for the great post!

ATI and NVIDIA

[Bishop, Martin]

All the graphic chip makers need to get their act together and release better drivers for linux. It took some work getting my 9800 pro working with gentoo, and the worst part is that my card is also an All in wonder, and there is currently no support for it, even with GATOS.

Packages Ready to go

[PaulK]

There are prepatched 2.6.0 installers here [www.sh.nu].

Minion [minion.de] is working fast towards a resolution, but it still looks like the drivers are below existing 4496 performance levels.

Improved performance

[locus_standi]

On my system, the new driver seems to perform much better if frame rate from glxgears and quake3d is any indication. I am seeing as much as 25% improvement in performance over the 4496!(using 2.4.21 kernel). I also tried the new drivers with patches from minion.de on a 2.6 kernel and could see improved performance. However, synaptic touchpad and pcmcia Wi-Fi seem to be broken in 2.6 so had to go back to 2.4 kernel.

4620 Drivers

[notanatheist]

Go find yourself the 4620 drivers. They work wonders with my FX5700 Ultra. No lockups like the 4496's.

Re:4620 Drivers

[Vireo]

Grab them here [pny.com] ; these packages include the nvidia-settings GUI tool BTW, which is real nice.

Re:4620 Drivers

[Afrosheen]

I just installed those drivers tonight after wrestling with the new (crap) drivers this whole story is about. The 4620 beta driver rocks, it has a nice little control panel where you can set gamma, anisotropic filtering, FSAA settings out the yin-yang, the whole 9 yards.

I'm surprised Nvidia doesn't say 'unless you have card X use these forever'.

The new drivers... A review of the problems...

[0x1337]

When X11 starts the drivers Oops, and default to ForceSW so no hw-accel.

Dmesg gives-
Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000010
printing eip:
c024b6cf
*pde = 00000000
Oops: 0000
CPU: 0
EIP: 0010:[<c024b6cf>] Tainted: P
EFLAGS: 00013046
eax: 00000087 ebx: 00003246 ecx: 00000048 edx: 00000000
esi: 00000000 edi: dffe3000 ebp: dad75738 esp: dad75708
ds: 0018 es: 0018 ss: 0018
Process X (pid: 246, stackpage=dad75000)
Stack: dad96400 dad75764 c01105ac dad96000 00003099 e0d9eca6 00000000 00000048
dad75734 e0dadd1e dbc90800 00000000 dad75748 e0db88cd 00000000 00000048
dad75774 e0db0ee6 dad96000 00000000 00000048 00000080 d9e60000 dad96400
Call Trace: [<c01105ac>] [<e0d9eca6>] [<e0dadd1e>] [<e0db88cd>] [<e0db0ee6>]
[<e0db47b7>] [<e0db6170>] [<e0f51080>] [<e0dbcc1e>] [<e0d9da58>] [<e0f51080>]
[<e0f38b9d>] [<e0f7a5a0>] [<e0f51080>] [<e0f7a5a0>] [<e0f51080>] [<e0dba65c>]
[<e0f51080>] [<e0f7a60c>] [<e0f7a630>] [<e0f7a648>] [<e0f51080>] [<e0dbd809>]
[<e0f51080>] [<e0f51080>] [<e0e489d2>] [<e0f2bd01>] [<e0dd55f7>] [<e0dadd1e>]
[<e0db8818>] [<e0f28151>] [<e0dba1db>] [<e0f28151>] [<e0f28151>] [<e0dba22c>]
[<e0f52700>] [<e0e842db>] [<e0dd0ed8>] [<e0dde76d>] [<e0e842db>] [<e0e84ac1>]
[<e0dae41a>] [<e0d9f95b>] [<e0d9f830>] [<e0dae5a5>] [<e0db9d82>] [<e0f51080>]
[<e0e4b627>] [<e0e8473f>] [<e0d9f195>] [<e0e842db>] [<e0e84ac1>] [<e0e842db>]
[<e0e84ac1>] [<e0ecd0d4>] [<e0e7d552>] [<e0e66833>] [<e0db9d82>] [<e0f51080>]
[<e0e68481>] [<e0e96fc5>] [<e0dbe389>] [<e0e68345>] [<e0dc1102>] [<e0db9d82>]
[<e0f51080>] [<e0dac53b>] [<e0e68bc4>] [<e0e68abb>] [<e0f51080>] [<e0d9dbc5>]
[<e0f38c06>] [<e0dbcbf1>] [<e0f51080>] [<e0d9c8a2>] [<e0f51080>] [<c0114854>]
[<c013c590>] [<c013c7d5>] [<e0d9c61b>] [<c014a0cc>] [<c0108e7f>]

Code: 8b 46 10 8b 50 30 89 34 24 89 4c 24 04 8b 44 24 20 89 44 24

Ksymoops gives-
>>EIP; c02dc0c1 <pci_read_config_dword+41/80> <=====

>>ebx; c3fbe000 <_end+3c02138/20530198>
>>ebp; c3fbf760 <_end+3c03898/20530198>
>>esp; c3fbf72c <_end+3c03864/20530198>

Trace; c01aedfc <pci_conf1_read_config_dword+4c/50>
Trace; e08f8739 <[nvidia]os_pci_read_dword+20/27>
Trace; e090784e <[nvidia]_nv001370rm+2e/cc>
Trace; e09123fd <[nvidia]_nv001241rm+11/18>
Trace; e090aa16 <[nvidia]_nv000171rm+22a/268>
Trace; e0aaab60 <[nvidia]nv_linux_devices+0/580>
Trace; e090e2e7 <[nvidia]_nv001749rm+167/50c>
Trace; e0aaab60 <[nvidia]nv_linux_devices+0/580>
Trace; e0916776 <[nvidia]rm_update_agp_config+e/14>
Trace; e08f7495 <[nvidia]nv_agp_init+78/fb>
Trace; e0aaab60 <[nvidia]nv_linux_devices+0/580>
Trace; e0ad410c <[nvidia].data.end+275/31c9>
Trace; e0ad4130 <[nvidia].data.end+299/31c9>
Trace; e0ad4148 <[nvidia].data.end+2b1/31c9>
Trace; e0ad40a0 <[nvidia].data.end+209/31c9>
Trace; e0aaab60 <[nvidia]nv_linux_devices+0/580>
Trace; e0ad40a0 <[nvidia].data.end+209/31c9>
Trace; e0aaab60 <[nvidia]nv_linux_devices+0/580>
Trace; e091418c <[nvidia]_nv001274rm+7c/b8>
Trace; e0aaab60 <[nvidia]nv_linux_devices+0/580>
Trace; e0ad410c <[nvidia].data.end+275/31c9>
Trace; e0ad4130 <[nvidia].data.end+299/31c9>
Trace; e0ad4148 <[nvidia].data.end+2b1/31c9>
Trace; e0aaab60 <[nvidia]nv_linux_devices+0/580>
Trace; e0917339 <[nvidia]_nv0008

Re:The new drivers... A review of the problems...

[crimsun]

From what we've been tracing, it actually looks like a bug in newer VIA chipsets triggerable in both 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. The patches at minion.de have a workaround for now.

Re:The new drivers... A review of the problems...

[Spoke]

I had a similar Oops with the 5328 Nvidia driver. However, the patches at minion.de [slashdot.org] didn't compile against 2.4.23 until I commented out the "typedef void irqreturn_t;" on line 409.

But even after that, X fails to start up. Back to the last release which were working OK on this Fedora Core 1 install and 2.4.23 kernel.

They sell MB chipsets, too....

[veg_all]

...and they are way late in releasing compilable source (never mind a binary) for Mandrake 9.2 for their nForce2 chipsets. While they were busy worsening their video drivers, I had to go out and buy a new NIC to replace the onboard ethernet! Is this complaint worth tossing out my moderation rights on this topic? Oh, who gives a fuck. Someone else can modify the damn GNA posts.

Oh, go stuff it.

[Baloo Ursidae]

Manufacturers are (quite rightfully) only concerned with how well it works for most people out there. If it works alright in testbed (usually a Debian, sometimes a Red Hat-based-distro box in general, not sure what nVidia uses for theirs), it ships.

Manufacturers can't and shouldn't be held accountable for changes local to a specific distro or host. Deal with it.

NWN works

[DeathPenguin]

Funny, I can play Neverwinter Nights just fine with my Ti4600 and 5328 drivers. Heck, I'm even using kernel 2.6 with the Minion.de driver patch.

Yes, I've seen a lot of complaints about the drivers on the nVnews.net forums [nvnews.net], but I really wish Slashdot editors would refrain from making blanket statements.

Re:NWN works

[Natalie's Hot Grits]

its not a blanket statement. Nvidia drivers for both nForce motherboard chipset and GeForce Graphics chipsets has never _EVER_ been of production quality. nVidia under linux is asking for trouble.

It's too bad too because combined with their drivers for windows, they have the best motherboard platform even when compared to intel chipsets... its a real shame.

5328 is awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

The newest drivers are great. I don't think people should complain about their northbrige being unsupported by nvagp, or about their own lack of skillz, that's just my 2 lemurs though.

The 4496 drivers totally sucked. They had display glitches in 3D programs (at 640x480 visual tearing in the middle of the screen even though I enabled vsync, and even worse at 800x600 there is distorted 'garbage' at the lower right corner of the screen, no glitches at higher resolutions though).

So the 4496 drivers are unusable to me, however the 5328 drivers rock! The performance is faster for me, no more strange artifacts or tearing, and yes with vsync enabled the fps on ut2003 has DOUBLED!

5328 is faster on linux kernel 2.4.x than on 2.6.x, but really I am [YOU ARE] lucky to have the very latest kernel supported so quickly :p

BTW for those who never RTFM, you have to set __GL_SYNC_DISPLAY_DEVICE to your device if you want it to actually sync to refresh. Also, pageflipping is now on by default and the Option name is changed, so look at your XF86Config people...

Thanks Nvidia and thanks Zander too :)

Rambling Post:

[big_groo]

From the article, it sounds as if it's a certain card that seems to be having problems - if it doesn't work for you, well, you should have backed up your kernel before trying. I have no sympathy for people who are *going* to say 'I can't even get X to start!'.

Another poster mentioned that someone has already built 2.6.0 .run files - that's cool, but I have no reason to change my *stable* system. Maybe next week when I'm bored.

Reading though this thread I've seen people extole the virtues of ATI and slam Nvidia. One particular poster said (s)he loves h(er/is) 9800. The first Google [google.ca] I get on this card shows a price of $299.00 US. I don't know about anyone else, but I think this is a *total* waste of money. I upgraded my last video card from a TNT2 (32MB) when I couldn't install Unreal Tournament 2003. Time to upgrade. Picked up a GeForce4 MX440. $99.00 CAN. I bought this card for one reason: Nvidia had drivers for Linux - and as a recent Linux convert, let me tell you, this is good news. Cudos to Nvidia - they'll get my $$ when it's time to upgrade again, and I'll get a card that's equivalent to the 299US card for 99CAN.

Re:Rambling Post:

[BiggerIsBetter]

Funnily enough, I did exactly the same thing. This despite being a Linux convert of about 6 years now. As much as I think open sourced drivers would be great I've had minimal problems with them, and even if I was using an ATI I'd probably run the XiG server anyway...

My only complaint about nvidia...

[rsilvergun]

is that they sell chips to whoever buys. True story: I bought a Geforce2 MX440 with 64 megs of DDR ram that _under_ performed my old 32 meg Geforce2 MX SDR. Near as I can tell the trouble is cheap ram, really cheap ram. It's the easiest place to save some money, and it seems the Best Buys and Circuit Cities of the world will buy cards from whoever offers the best profit margine. I mean, why sell an $80 card for $99 when you can sell a $50 card for that.

That said, I tried the ATI equivalent and gave up o

Re:My only complaint about nvidia...

[DeathPenguin]

ATi has recently turned to this practice as well. You can get ATi-based cards ("Powered by ATi") from Asus [asus.com], Tyan [tyan.com], and a variety of others.

Re:My only complaint about nvidia...

[BenjyD]

The DDR and SDR Geforce2 MXs are virtually identical in performance - the DDR one should be a few percent slower, as it has the same memory bandwidth but a slightly higher latency (IIRC).
That's because the SDR has a 128bit bus, while the DDR has a 64bit bus, at double-speed. Same bandwidth pretty much. It's nothing to do with cheap RAM.

what about sleep?

[ejaw5]

Judging from the Drivers page and README, it seems they haven't yet addressed the problem of the computer not able to go into sleep/suspend while the driver is loaded. A bit of a nuicance for notebook users...

Re:what about sleep?

[mbertini]

I've installed the drivers yesterday on my DELL Inspiron 8200 (RH 9). APM suspend works, it's standby that is not supported.

fedora + 4496 nvidia drivers

[painehope]

the 4496 drivers would lock my workstation at work ( Ti4200 card )every few days using the default Fedora kernel. I think there's a newer kernel out, might try it again.
My solution was to revert to the latest RH9 kernel, as I don't have time to chase down a bug in a closed-source driver, that locks X, so I can't see any console messages, and prints nothing to syslog.

Howto with Fedora Core 1

[ags]

I had lots of problems getting NVidia to work with FC1. Things would kind of work, but other things wouldn't. Getting TuxRacer to work is a good litmus test.

Then I found this page [artoo.net] of unofficial FC1 FAQ. Yay...!!

Here's what to do - it worked for me:

Use these instructions if there are no RPMs available, or if the available RPMs don't work for you.

Make sure you have the lastest drivers.

Now print this out, or write it down. Then:

1. You must have kernel-source installed for this to work. Check the "Add/Remove Applications" tool in System Settings on the red-hat menu.
2. Shut down X (as root, do telinit 3 in a terminal).
3. Log in as root and go to the directory where you downloaded the nVidia drivers.
4. Type CC="gcc32" sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4496-pkg2.run --add-this-kernel.
5. There will be some whirring and wailing, and then do CC="gcc32" sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4496-pkg2-custom.run That will do a correct install of your nVidia drivers.
6. Follow nVidia's instructions to set up the driver. (Read the "EDITING YOUR XF86CONFIG FILE" section.)
7. You can now restart X by typing telinit 5.

If none of this works, do rpm -e --nodeps XFree86-Mesa-libGL and then restart your computer. The need to do this should soon be eliminated -- watch this FAQ or the fedora-list. Note that if you update XFree86, this package will be reinstalled and you will need to remove it again. This solves the "DRI" problem.

Poor Nvidia

[superpulpsicle]

They have been getting such a bad wrap one after another. I'll tell you from owning both ATI Radeon and Nvidia Geforce cards, that Nvidia has always been the one with the better drivers.

Owning an ATI Radeon 9800 now with so many graphical features disabled and tweaks in general, I swear I am almost better off owning a Geforce FX5900.

Works fine for me without any tweaking

[Little Hamster]

I guess I must have lucked out. Reinstall my desktop today with Mandrake 9.2, and since the old one I have required a kernel interface compile (it's way too old), I downloaded the new one (5328), and worked first time I installed it. The only thing is that I can't load the GLcore module. I think sometimes you can't just take these forums as an indication of how wide spread the problem is. People who have problems are also the loudest ones.

General question

[rsax]

OK this isn't directly related to Nvidia but more of a general inquiry. Are there any video card manufacturers who consider XFree86 users a priority, even a small one? For some reason I always had the impression that Matrox released good drivers for XFree86 and that they're video cards are generally well supported. Whenever the "X is slow" argument arises people usually say that X performance is contingent on good video drivers. So what are the best video drivers out there right now? I want to build a new box soon which will be used to dual boot Windows and Linux. I would like to be able to play games on both operating systems but if that isn't possible then atleast be able to have really good drivers for Linux for normal desktop use.

This is where Linux is retarded...

[mcrbids]

Linux is retarded in the area of any kind of kernel module.

Yes, the Linux kernel is nice and modular, and you can make modules and do some neat stuff (like dynamic loading) with them, but....

Why do modules have to be custom compiled to each exact kernel version?

A binary API should be developed with standard hooks that allow for things like video cards, sound cards, soft modems, scanners, and other crap to operate via a protected, binary-compatable API that doesn't change in any minor release. (EG: 2.4.x should be cross compatable)

One of the successes of Microsoft's hardware compatability is that I can frequently use a driver from Windows 3.1 on my Windows 98 or ME system.

Linux developers can cry all they want to about "open" drivers, but there are plenty of times where that just isn't feasible. And, why shouldn't there be a single, well-documented API that allows for binary driver distribution?

Why should this "pollute" anything at all?

Spending any more than 10 or 20 minutes loading a driver is retarded, and even though I'm a firm believer in Linux and its future, I'll be the first to say this.

Create a clear, binary-compatable API for drivers and the drivers will appear like magic, especially if it's similar to the API for Windows drivers.

Hardware companies are begging for more sales, and if they can get them by recompiling their windows drivers, or at the very least putting out and supporting a single driver file for "2.4.x kernel" Linux, you'll find that lots of companies would be perfectly happy to "play nice"...

Re:This is where Linux is retarded...

[fruey]

I can frequently use a driver from Windows 3.1 on my Windows 98 or ME system.

You might get a printer to work with older drivers, but are you really serious in saying that 16 bit Win3.1 drivers worked satisfactorily for you in Windows? We are talking about high end graphics card drivers here, not keyboard, printer or network card drivers. The only things which most Linux users can't get to work these days fall into two categories:

• software driven hardware... that is to say, hardware which is basically a simple I/O device and all processing happens in the main CPU. Like some modems, cheap USB scanners, etc.
• high end specific cards with separate processing units on them (GPUs, low latency audio processors, hardware encoding cards, TV combo cards)

Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think you'd get any of those kinds of hardware running in WinME with even a Win98 driver let alone a driver from Win3.1!

Re:This is where Linux is retarded...

[The One KEA]

What you suggest will never happen, because Linus has made it absolutely clear that the Linux kernel will NEVER have a binary-compatible ABI. He absolutely refuses to support closed-source binary modules and will NOT accept patches to the kernel to make it friendly to such modules.

Why? Because it goes against the spirit of the GPL AND because it's a legal grey area which could result in frivolous lawsuits which could waste the time of the OSS community, like SCO is so successfully doing right now.

Unless Linus changes his mind (unlikely) or hardware manufacturers GPL their code and/or release full programming specs, then the status quo will undoubtedly remain.

Re:This is where Linux is retarded...

[Billly Gates]

Actually Linus mentioned he kind of favors proprietary modules and drm if someone wanted to do so. To say no would enforce his opinions on someone else and he wants an OS for anyone who wants it. I am not saying that he supports drm and proprietary software. I am just saying he believes that anyone should do whatever they want with Linux and he does not want to get involved.

The reason he wont include such drivers is because of legal and political reasons. Debian would fork the kernel in a second! They refu

Plea for help here...

[The Master Control P]

Right now, I'd do anything just to GET the Nvidia drivers working at all. As it is, all their drivers have done is left me without any working OpenGL at all.

I've repeatedly tried using their drivers, version 4496. The first time I did so and started X, it worked a little like Windows Airlines. Everything looked good, until I tried to open the menu bar and the system locked up completely. Absolutely nothing could back out of X or get control back. Taking a look at the logs, it said "Unable to find NVidia

Re:Plea for help here...

[Little Hamster]

With "nv", you can't have load glx. And that's why you are getting "Failed to add GLX extension (NVIDIA XFree86 driver not found)".

With "nvidia", you need load glx, but you have to delete load dri and load glcore. Actually, I played around with it for a while and find that you can actually still load dri, but not glcore.

As for the kernel interface, if you are using a standard kernel from a major distribution, nvidia has precompiled ones. So it shouldn't reached that step unless you really know what you ar

4496 Drivers Just Fine

[estergum]

Greetings,

For what its worth, I've always been happy with the Nvidia drivers.

So the 5328 drive doesn't work for me with ONE app, the fail back was efortless and I'm playing NWN again.

Kudos to the Nvidia team.

Cheers.

For what it worth..

[Vilou]

We're actually packaging nvidia drivers for Fedora core 1 for the http://rpm.livna.org/ repository.
See : http://bugzilla.livna.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45

Feedback from the Clueful Ones is welcome.
Good day.

Nvidia AGP + Fedora = Crash

[noselasd]

Just FYI, the nvidia drivers contain their own AGP driver,
it can be used by e.g. setting the XF86config option NvAGP=1.
This reliably oopses the kernel in Fedora with this new driver.
If anyone else wonder why the new driver don't work, make sure it uses
the kernel AGP driver, not the nvidia one.

Testing?

[Doc Ruby]

Don't developers spend money on any testing anymore? Every goddamn program I get these days shows that it was obviously released without any testing feedback. I know Netscape ruined the software biz model by releasing "betas" for consumption, marketing the product before it was tested. And Microsoft has never gotten anything right before version 3.0. But with malware liability looming, when will some kind of quality control come back?

Works here

[be-fan]

The new drivers work just fine on my system (like every other NVIDIA driver I've tried). I'm getting about a 10% performance improvement across the board. My specs:

Debian sid
Kernel 2.4.22
GeForce4Go 440 (NV17)
Pentium 4 2.0
i845 mobile chipset

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:What?!!

[LordHunter317]

Bullshit. Whatever makes you think it is that easy to build drivers for graphics cards that can just pull the source to the old one and recompile? Absolute nonsense. At best, that might be true within a single driver family, and even then, some hacking is required to update PCI IDs, and possibly the list of features the card supports.

Every different card line however, requries a different underlying layer to handle all the little tweaks and get maximium performance. Its not nearly as simple as you think.

Have you ever doen any hardware programming before? The fact that nVidia has a single driver serving such a wide line of cards is quite a feat. I've seen drivers that had to have 2 seperate code paths simply because of revisions to firmeware within the same "Version" of the software.

Re:What?!!

[Lord Kano]

Perhaps the original poster was not clear enough in what he meant.

To make an example, if you have version 1.0 of your driver, under most circumstances you don't junk it all and rewrite all of it from scratch to get to version 1.1.

You take the 1.0 code and fix some bugs and add some new features, recompile it and release as version 1.1.

LK

Re:What?!!

[heydonms]

I would be happy to have to choose the model, verion and revision of my graphics card every time I update my drivers if they would just stop crashing my machine.

Re:What?!!

[RupW]

Every different card line however, requries a different underlying layer to handle all the little tweaks and get maximium performance. Its not nearly as simple as you think.

OK, but they can lift this out of their Windows drivers.

I used to work for a network card manufacturer, and we wrote our drivers in three layers: OS-specific hardware interface layer, general card control layer, OS-specific API. So once we'd got the top and bottom layers right, we got all any fixes and improvements in the card control logic across all OSes for free.

NVidia are big on their "unified driver architecture" and stuff so I'd be very surprised if they didn't do it this way too. So all they need to do is to swap the Linux glue layers into their latest Windows drivers and recompile.

Re:new drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

this seems to be pretty common

Sadly yes, it does seem pretty common. I've got a Radeon and I often find myself checking how people are finding the new drivers before getting them myself. It shouldn't be that way :(

But - 'may take a little while to become fully stable' - I don't think so. We're not talking about a completely new product here. They're basically just tweaking their existing code, and should do enough testing so as the release doesn't get a bad rep straight away.

What will you say the next

Re:Nvidia's Detonators are designed to force upgra

[MoronGames]

"Doesn't anyone find it odd that they reccomend the SAME drivers for an 8mb TNT card and a 256mb quadra or FX? The latest windows drivers are larger (8.5 Mb) than the amount of memory on the former!!"

Sure, but it's not like the entire driver file is being loaded into to the video card's memory. That's just to control the video card, you know? I'm fairly certain, as well, that the driver that is loaded is different for the newer FX's and the older TNT cards. I'm fairly certain, actually, that each generatio

Re:Nvidia's Detonators are designed to force upgra

[DeathPenguin]

>>Doesn't anyone find it odd that they reccomend the SAME drivers for an 8mb TNT card and a 256mb quadra or FX?

Not at all--Their unified driver architecture helps to make sure that no matter which card a user has, he only needs to download one driver package.

Believe it or not, many people don't even know which video card they own, much less could they tell the difference between a GeForce MX 200, GeForce MX 400, GeForce MX 440, GeForce FX 5600, GeForce 5900, GeForce 5950 Ultra, one of many varieties of "Quadro" based products, etc. It's easier and a lot less error prone to tell people just to download the 'latest nVidia graphics driver' than to go into the device manager or lspci or whatever and figure out exactly which piece of hardware they own.

Re:And how is this a good thing ?

[bovinewasteproduct]

I belive that they have ONE driver source tree and just do builds outside the tree based on platform. If they had to recreate their entire build system/layout just Linux, they may not have even supported it...

BWP

not really

[rebelcool]

I rarely upgrade video drivers due to the old adage "if it aint broke, don't fix it" is a good thing to live by. (case in point: upgrading to the newest 50-series drivers causes Win XP to core dump and wrecks certain system files when playing Enemy Territory on my system)

Because of this, I might only upgrade my drivers once a year or less, basically only if I run into a problem. Trying to remember the exact card model I have after months of never thinking about it is rather difficult. "Hm, GF3..Ti200?

Re:And how is this a good thing ?

[DeathPenguin]

>>If people can't cope with simple tasks such as this, they probably shouldn't be performing any maintenance on their PC at all, in particular installing new video drivers.

How wonderfully arrogant.

Why not simplify maintenance tasks so that more users can perform them on their own? I guess some would rather keep this sort of elitist attitude that makes the geek community look bad, particularly the GNU/Linux users.

Besides, maybe it's not just novices that could use a little help. Perhaps some people

I'd define bloat differently.

[anti-NAT]

I'd consider bloat to be when there is very little increase in functionality, yet the cost in consumed disk space or RAM is significant. I would consider MS Clippy would be a canonical example.

Does KDE offer increased, and more importantly, useful additional functionality to you ? If it does, then you have decided to accept the extra CPU, RAM and disk space it requires. It could also be argued that the visual "beauty" of the environment makes your computer more pleasurable to use, which will increase your

Re:Agh.

[treke]

http://minion.de has 2.6 compatible packages for this release.

Re:Agh.

[treke]

Pardon me for thinking that the link might help people that werent aware of the complete no patch needed distribution files.

Re:Wonderful!

[Anonymous Coward]

The "source code" consists of some headers and a couple large binary object files, so you can relink the kernel driver against whatever kernel you have to be running. The X11 driver is pure closed source.

Nobody should praise NVIDIA as a perfect Linux citizen for providing these drivers. They do work, and it is a better solution than some hardware companies that provide no support at all. But they have consistently refused to provide documentation to write a fully free driver, so there is no 3d support a

Re:face it nVidia

[Fnkmaster]

Um, no. How about the fact that the Windows driver APIs remain constant within any major release of Windows, whereas Linux driver APIs (or really ABIs here) change slightly even between minor releases of Linux kernels? This is of course intentional - it's supposed to be hard to make closed source drivers. If Linux developers wanted to make it easy, there would be a simple, clear, well documented set of driver development and interface ABIs that only changed with major version releases (2.2, 2.4, 2.6, etc.). Then it wouldn't be necessary to do a partial/stub recompile for every version and have dozens of different packagings of binary and partial-source versions of the NVidia drivers, and they would probably end up much more stable and functional.

So yes, I agree it's quite hard to produce Linux drivers that are stable and functional across a broad range of Linux kernel versions and XFree versions, and I am sure it is in part because there are more users and thus more developers working on the Windows drivers, in large part it's because of the inherent features of the Linux platform. Which of course may be desireable for many people who want to encourage companies to release specs or truly Open Source drivers.

Re:face it nVidia

[Jacek Poplawski]

I don't get it. Do you mean all nVidia driver problems are related to changing kernel ABI? But that part of drivers is open source.

IMHO problem is somewhere else. There are millions of possible configurations, and few people working on driver just can't solve each problem. In open source driver there are more workers (they don't need money from company), so it's much easier to fix driver for individuals.

Re:face it nVidia

[Fnkmaster]

No, I said _a large part_ of the problem is the changing kernel ABI. But that's not the only factor. Another substantial part is that there are more users and thus more developers working on the Windows drivers. You're right, with Open Source drivers the number of man-hours put into updating the drivers wouldn't be limited to the small number of folks NVidia has working on them, and they would probably end up more stable faster, not to mention that the problems with the kernel ABI changing would be prett

Re:face it nVidia

[DataPath]

well, except for the API change from 95 to 95 w/USB, 95 to 98, 98 to 98SE, 98SE to ME.

Then there's the NT line.

The driver model changed slightly with each revision in the 9x line, and not necessarily in a core area.

And under linux, although the ABI may change from minor version to minor version, it IS just a simple compile against the different headers (for, I suspect, not all, but the majority of cases).

Really, the ideal thing for nVidia would be for THEM to publish an API (not necessarily full docs fo

Re:face it nVidia

[jrockway]

> And Linux nVidia Driver will be always described with one word: crappy.

Let's give nVidia a break. Yeah, one bad version of drivers. They work fine for me (although not with AGP enabled). Anyway, let's see if they fix this. They probably will, and we'll all be happy again.

And BTW many games get higher fps under linux than windows. Crappy indeed.

Re:face it nVidia

[Jacek Poplawski]

And BTW many games get higher fps under linux than windows. Crappy indeed.

FPS is not everything. In Linux I could expect stability. Do you have framebuffer enabled?

Re:Once again, Linux displays it's flaws.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true... The most current nVidia drivers for my Gainward Geforce2 GTS installed on Win2k are crap. They completely break it. Seems to me nVidia just isn't doing a good job in supporting its older variety cards.

Notice all the "hey these drivers kick ass" comments are comming from users of GF4s or better?

Note: Here's what I mean by being horribly broken.
http://www.hayenga.com/mitch/mario1.gif

they suck on GF3 as well

[rebelcool]

The 50series of drivers for WinXP cause a system crash when playing certain games with Punkbuster. On my system it hosed some system file requiring a reinstall of the OS off its boot disk. I have a MSI GF3 Ti200.

XP makes the process fairly painless (all your settings are saved for everything), but it still requires a couple of hours to reload off the disk and then reacquire service pack 1 and assorted patches to bring it back up to date. And theres the occasional need to reload a driver or two.

I downgr