“The last time we had written an article on Nouveau, the community project working on developing an open-source 3D display driver for NVIDIA hardware, was this past January after being enlightened by glxgears finally being able to run on NVIDIA’s NV4x GPUs. Since then many developments have occurred with this open-source NVIDIA driver as we have covered in several news postings. In this article today we will share with you where the Nouveau project stands today from a user perspective as well as testing out the driver on a few more NVIDIA systems.”
As I remember, when this project started, i had a strange feeling about it’s sucess. But as i saw later work, Noveau looks very promising. Now we need similar project with AMD.
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Yeah, the radeon rivers need to be rethought and reimplemented. Much of the code in the radeon drivers are based off of what ati had given the oss community a long time ago. I think starting from scratch and doing clean room drivers would be the better solution. This article doesn’t speak on performance though.
Are you kidding? You’re really comparing a real-world working driver which supports pretty much every application on a large gamut of video cards released since a least 2000 with a new incomplete driver which has problem even switching resolution in a fairly common card and can’t really do more than display glxgears?
Why should one throw out years of development for a “clean room” work which couldn’t possibly give comparable results in years? The nouveau project is a good thing and deserves attention but, please, keep your feet on the ground and don’t buy all the hype.
I wasn’t buying the hype. My impression of the ati drivers (which I use) is that they generally suck, the performance is awful and there are features missing. On top of that stability is a factor. When I mean throw out I don’t mean get rid of the drivers, i mean start working on better drivers and deprecate the radeon drivers when and if the other ones work better. Maybe doing a clean room driver may have better results. This is just my opinion though so who knows, we’ll see when they let us know how these perform, if they perform as crappy as the radeon drivers, then they shouldn’t bother.
Part of the problem with the “maturity” of the PC software industry is that it’s extremely expensive for a vendor to start over with a clean slate and the benefit of hindsight. The driver architects at the big graphics vendors realize that they could design a better performing and much more reliable driver by starting over, but they also know that improving the existing driver is more cost-effective. The graphics vendors don’t have to option of dropping their existing drivers to work on new ones, but the free software community does.
It won’t take “years” for the Nouveau project to provide “good enough” 3D performance for the majority of *nix users. In 18 months, Nouveau will certainly be the default NVIDIA driver in Ubuntu and Fedora, and most users won’t have a compelling reason to switch to the binary blob. It needs to handle Compiz with ease and some previous-generation games via Cedega. Give them 18 months, possibly even less.
Actually, there *is* a project similar to this for AMD / ATI graphics cards. It is called avivo and it is located here:
http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=avivo/xf86-video-avivo.git;a=summa…
They are currently trying to get acceleration for the r500 based cards working like they do with the r300 based cards. Long live open source!
Edit:
Adding link talking about this driver a bit. Not everyone wants to just read through code:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=753&num=1
Edited 2007-07-01 05:48
@Dr-ROX is this an advertisement
“Browser: Opera/9.50 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/4.0.8462/20; U; en)”
I hate the phoronix articles. I actually cringe whenever I’m see one…and their benchmarking is quite frankly appalling. Whats worse is that when you get articles concerning *cutting edge* drivers, they are always out of date, and contain little to *NO* information.
The only thing I gleaned from the article is that Fedora looks very pretty
Roguelike:Vanilla Angband (3.0.8 prerelease 1;Mage;Level 27)
Edited 2007-06-30 20:28
@Dr-ROX is this an advertisement
OSAlert automatically posts mobile user agents. Next time, please contact the OSAlert-crew for these matters, don’t use the forums.
osnews should have an option to post useragents in the preferences, so i can do it too
@Thom_Holwerda “OSAlert automatically posts mobile user agents. Next time, please contact the OSAlert-crew for these matters, don’t use the forums.”
Then it shouldn’t. My question was both civil and accurate, How would I know OS-News promotes Opera. I thought it was a choice of the individual. I didn’t take points off him so what are you on about?
I have to agree about Phoronix. Many of their articles are like this and really devoid of useful content, or filled with useless and meaningless benchmarks.
Same here. I especially like how they manage to make useless graphic card benchmarks each time Nvivia or ATI release a new driver update, testing only programs nobody uses, and showing a variation from 64,34 FPS to 64,35 FPS
What? Dude, we have had a project for ATI/AMD open source video drivers long before Nouveau started. R300 series are working, R400 and R500 are under active development, and work on R600 has started. I think R600 is at about the same functionality as the Nouveau driver, but I’m not too sure (don’t own an ATI card personally).
What exactly is that supposed to accomplish? Is there any evidence that the shortcomings of the current ATI/AMD drivers cannot be fixed without rewriting them? Starting from scratch “just because” is one of those things that inexperienced/incompetent software developers like to do all too often. Chances are, any shortcomings of the current driver would persist into an all new driver, because both drivers would suffer from the same lack of documentation and vendor support.
Actually, many of the developers working on the radeon drivers say that there are some fundamental design flaws they would like to get rid of. Whether a complete rewrite from scratch is needed, I don’t know, but they do at least need a major overhaul. Sometimes it is easier to just start from scratch and use the old code as a reference, and other times that would just be stupid.
Yes, I read something like that. The r300 driver team also picked up a trick or two from noveau’s reverse engineering tools that hopefully will be put to good use soon. Nevertheless, the r300 driver with a Radeon 9800 Pro already gives 10x the frames per second the noveau driver with a GF 6600 shows in the screenshot running glxgears. That’s not a very good benchmark, though.
Still, I feel the open ATI drivers are in very good hands.