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My biggest hope out of all of this is that Nvidia will get its act together and release proper drivers for Linux now. I honestly don't care all that much about

My biggest hope out of all of this is that Nvidia will get its act together and release proper drivers for Linux now. I honestly don't care all that much about games except that they might force Nvidia to actually care about Linux.

cookiecaper 14y ago
wut. nVidia has always cared about Linux. They've supported non-Windows platforms well for a very long time. They've done a lot of work to provide a good workstation experience on Linux. Today the notable exception is Optimus, but I'm hoping that's going to come down the pipe as nVidia pushes its inevitable KMS branch further down the line. AMD drivers are still not really usable; you can work around some of the bugs with open-source drivers, but then your speeds are severely crippled. The mantra among Linux users has always been "buy nvidia". Those with ATI quickly grow to regret it in my experience; a meaningful illustration may be that my parents have two Linux boxes, both relatively low-end PCs with onboard graphics. One of these is almost four years old now, and has an onboard nvidia GPU. The other was purchased three months ago and has an onboard AMD GPU ("APU" according to marketing material. Bobcat? Or was it Bulldozer?). We still use the 4-year-old machine for gaming there because the nvidia drivers are actually sufficient to play the game; the new machine is using an open-source driver due to Catalyst bugs and runs games at probably 20% the performance of the machine 16x its age. That's the experience you get with nVidia's competitors.
- freehunter 14y ago
  Sounds like you missed the discussion on Torvald's "Fuck You" video and nVidia's response. nVidia only cares about Linux when it's easy.
  - hapless 14y ago
    Torvalds was angry about Tegra, not GPU drivers.
    - Symmetry 14y ago
      There's also the Optimus "We have no plans to support Linux" situation.
    - exDM69 14y ago
      It was mostly about desktop GPU drivers and he said nothing about them specifically. And it was most certainly not targeted at Tegra drivers. Tegra kernel parts are mostly open sourced (not the user space, though) and the Tegra kernel team is doing a lot of work that is important to running Linux on ARM SoC's, not just Tegra specific parts.
    - coldpie 14y ago
      Possibly, but their GPU drivers are also frustrating crap. Yes, AMD/ATI's drivers are far worse, but nvidia is still dropping the ball. Binary blobs in your kernel are bad for everyone. Kernel developers are often rightly uninterested in kernel problems that occur in environments that are "tainted" by black-box code. Nvidia's driver doesn't play nicely with the Linux GPU stack and ecosystem. Consider their "twinview" nonsense, requiring a legacy xorg.conf, and duplicating functionality present in the standardized xrandr 1.2. Fullscreen programs are an iffy proposition at best with nvidia's drivers, made even worse if you have multiple monitors, as a result of their refusal to work with the community and the standard tools. A game developer as important as Valve officially supporting Linux has the potential to force nvidia to finally start playing nice, or even better, get their head out of their asses and just open-source their drivers and get them into the kernel. That way every nvidia user on Earth can benefit from an officially supported, open, community-driven driver. Slim chance, but I would've said the same about native L4D2 if you'd asked me 2 months ago.
      - jiggy2011 14y ago
        Add this to your /etc/environment SDL_VIDEO_FULLSCREEN_DISPLAY=1 SDK_VIDEO_FULLSCREEN_HEAD=1 Will fix the dual monitor/twinview issue for some programs.
      - hapless 14y ago
        The nvidia driver codebase is HUUUGE, much of it is valuable proprietary information, and much of it is third party. It would be extremely challenging for nvidia to open source it, from both legal and business perspectives. I do hold out hope for nvidia gaining full xrandr and kms support at some point. The latest beta drivers have significantly increased xrandr support.
  - exDM69 14y ago
    Linus has his reasons to be pissed. But from a desktop users' point of view, Nvidia has been the only vendor that has shipped working GPU drivers with 3d and video for the past decade. All other vendors have had worse drivers, sometimes even completely unusable or just buggy. The situation has improved, though.
  - cookiecaper 14y ago
    There is no way I'll believe getting good performance out of nvidia cards on Linux was easy.
pinkbucket 14y ago
I just fired up a machine with Nvidia drivers running on XP and Nvidia drivers on Linux. Weirdly the Linux system runs much better. I wonder if that's a Linux thing or an Nvidia thing. My laptop likewise runs games better under Linux than Windows Vista, it has a basic integrated Intel GFX chip. Perhaps they are older versions of Windows, so it's not really a fair comparison. But it's interesting nonetheless. Perhaps gaming under Linux might prove better.

cookiecaper 14y ago

wut. nVidia has always cared about Linux. They've supported non-Windows platforms well for a very long time. They've done a lot of work to provide a good workstation experience on Linux. Today the notable exception is Optimus, but I'm hoping that's going to come down the pipe as nVidia pushes its inevitable KMS branch further down the line. AMD drivers are still not really usable; you can work around some of the bugs with open-source drivers, but then your speeds are severely crippled. The mantra among Linux users has always been "buy nvidia". Those with ATI quickly grow to regret it in my experience; a meaningful illustration may be that my parents have two Linux boxes, both relatively low-end PCs with onboard graphics. One of these is almost four years old now, and has an onboard nvidia GPU. The other was purchased three months ago and has an onboard AMD GPU ("APU" according to marketing material. Bobcat? Or was it Bulldozer?). We still use the 4-year-old machine for gaming there because the nvidia drivers are actually sufficient to play the game; the new machine is using an open-source driver due to Catalyst bugs and runs games at probably 20% the performance of the machine 16x its age. That's the experience you get with nVidia's competitors.

freehunter 14y ago
Sounds like you missed the discussion on Torvald's "Fuck You" video and nVidia's response. nVidia only cares about Linux when it's easy.
- hapless 14y ago
  Torvalds was angry about Tegra, not GPU drivers.
  - Symmetry 14y ago
    There's also the Optimus "We have no plans to support Linux" situation.
  - exDM69 14y ago
    It was mostly about desktop GPU drivers and he said nothing about them specifically. And it was most certainly not targeted at Tegra drivers. Tegra kernel parts are mostly open sourced (not the user space, though) and the Tegra kernel team is doing a lot of work that is important to running Linux on ARM SoC's, not just Tegra specific parts.
  - coldpie 14y ago
    Possibly, but their GPU drivers are also frustrating crap. Yes, AMD/ATI's drivers are far worse, but nvidia is still dropping the ball. Binary blobs in your kernel are bad for everyone. Kernel developers are often rightly uninterested in kernel problems that occur in environments that are "tainted" by black-box code. Nvidia's driver doesn't play nicely with the Linux GPU stack and ecosystem. Consider their "twinview" nonsense, requiring a legacy xorg.conf, and duplicating functionality present in the standardized xrandr 1.2. Fullscreen programs are an iffy proposition at best with nvidia's drivers, made even worse if you have multiple monitors, as a result of their refusal to work with the community and the standard tools. A game developer as important as Valve officially supporting Linux has the potential to force nvidia to finally start playing nice, or even better, get their head out of their asses and just open-source their drivers and get them into the kernel. That way every nvidia user on Earth can benefit from an officially supported, open, community-driven driver. Slim chance, but I would've said the same about native L4D2 if you'd asked me 2 months ago.
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      Add this to your /etc/environment SDL_VIDEO_FULLSCREEN_DISPLAY=1 SDK_VIDEO_FULLSCREEN_HEAD=1 Will fix the dual monitor/twinview issue for some programs.
    - hapless 14y ago
      The nvidia driver codebase is HUUUGE, much of it is valuable proprietary information, and much of it is third party. It would be extremely challenging for nvidia to open source it, from both legal and business perspectives. I do hold out hope for nvidia gaining full xrandr and kms support at some point. The latest beta drivers have significantly increased xrandr support.
- exDM69 14y ago
  Linus has his reasons to be pissed. But from a desktop users' point of view, Nvidia has been the only vendor that has shipped working GPU drivers with 3d and video for the past decade. All other vendors have had worse drivers, sometimes even completely unusable or just buggy. The situation has improved, though.
- cookiecaper 14y ago
  There is no way I'll believe getting good performance out of nvidia cards on Linux was easy.

pinkbucket 14y ago

I just fired up a machine with Nvidia drivers running on XP and Nvidia drivers on Linux. Weirdly the Linux system runs much better. I wonder if that's a Linux thing or an Nvidia thing. My laptop likewise runs games better under Linux than Windows Vista, it has a basic integrated Intel GFX chip. Perhaps they are older versions of Windows, so it's not really a fair comparison. But it's interesting nonetheless. Perhaps gaming under Linux might prove better.