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Nvidia Removed Linux Driver Feature Due to Windows
- betterunix 13y agoCan someone please explain why "feature parity" even matters here? If Nvidia can do something with GNU/Linux that is technically hard to do with Windows, why shouldn't they do it? In what way does it make sense to force technical limitations of Windows on GNU/Linux users?
- regularfry 13y agoIt's possible they have a licensing deal with MS that forces them to do this, the same way Amazon dictate that they must have the best price on a book. Then again, I find the simplicity argument somewhat convincing as well. NVidia's unified driver model must be hellishly complicated anyway, anything they can do to keep control of the complexity is probably something they'd greet with open arms.
- devx 13y agoIt doesn't. That's just their excuse. If it did, they'd start removing Windows driver features, too, since they can't be found on the Linux driver, and therefore there's no feature parity.
- pyre 13y agoPressure from Microsoft in some fashion?
- frank_boyd 13y agoValid point. We know how MS has managed to keep up their sales point monopoly for decades (forced Windows sales via mandatory pre-installations). We know how they wanted to offer exclusively their browser on Windows (the EU disagreed with that idea).
- firloop 13y agoMaybe Nvidia doesn't want end users to feel like they're missing out on anything on Windows, therefore finding the need to cripple Linux users?
- pyre 13y agoBut what is Nvidia's motivation for that? How does Nvidia win if people stay on Windows vs. moving to Linux? As far as graphics cards are concerned, they would just start putting more effort into their Linux support (to match the swing in customer OS usage).
- wmil 13y ago"feature parity" is a poor choice of words, but nVidia builds their Windows and Linux drivers from a single code base. Keeping support for four monitors in the linux code probably meant adding a bunch of #ifdefs in various files. They just decided it wasn't worth the effort to maintain.
- pyre 13y agoThat may be true, but they are presumably already maintaining a bunch of #ifdef's for the Windows-only features.
- eridius 13y agoGiven the relative popularity of Windows vs Linux, it probably is worth the effort to maintain Windows-only features.
- 67726e 13y agoTrue, but Windows has the much larger market share so it becomes worth it.
- kbenson 13y agoBeing able to assume the #ifdef for features go one direction can have some benefit in reasoning about the code it relates to. In other words, there may be benefits to keeping the windows features a superset of the linux features, most likely in preventing stupid programmer errors.
- chris_wot 13y ago> That may be true We'll never know. That's a binary blob on your machine.
- pyre 13y agoThis is true, but I fail to see the relevance here. This post just comes across as a "any chance to mention Free Software" type post. This thread is talking about if this decision by Nvidia makes sense. Trying to inject "well, we could all just ignore Nvidia if you were using Free Software," doesn't really contribute much to that conversation. > That's a binary blob on your machine. On my machine? It's less likely than you might think.
- jlgreco 13y agoHow is this a limitation with Windows even? I'm sure Windows can have more than 3 displays, so why does Nvidia have this restriction on either platform?
- anonymfus 13y agoBecause they sell "professional" Quadro/Tesla cards with this feature enabled at enormous prices.
- jlgreco 13y agoAaaah... so this probably is not about Linux vs. Windows, but rather actually about 'GeForce GTX 560 Ti' vs. Quadro. They aren't worried about driving people away from Windows, they are worried about cannibalizing Quadro sales. There is probably a lot of use cases for many monitors that don't really require Windows (perhaps pro power-users, like traders, who need lots of browser windows open at once), so they need to ensure that their premium cards retain their edge even on Linux. That makes much more sense.
- gizmo686 13y agoBut how many of those users would need to use NVIDIA's drivers? As I understand it, the benefit of NVIDIA's drivers over Noueveau is performance, not basic hardware support. If all you need is many monitors for web browsers, then you should not have a problem using Noueveau.
- jlgreco 13y ago> But how many of those users would need to use NVIDIA's drivers? That's a good point; I cannot say. Perhaps they think they are dealing with people who think 3D performance is necessary, or dealing with people (IT organizations?) that prefer 1st party drivers to hardware savings. I don't think Microsoft is really involved in this though.
- betterunix 13y ago
- AUmrysh 13y agoI bet it has more to do with them pushing new cards and wanting users to replace them with new ones. I have the 560 Ti and it's capable of playing most current games comfortably. The newer cards seem to be able to do 4 monitors, but the 500 series is being left behind by nvidia as they push the 600/700 series with their shield and shadowplay features.
- static_typed 13y agoOh, you bought Nvidia? Well, that was your first problem, and fault. The Intel graphics are not so fast, but at least a big chunk are open source.
- pyre 13y agoI'm unaware of the ability to drive a 4-monitor xorg desktop off of Intel graphics. The user in question here was attempting to do such a thing, which was supposed to be possible with the Nvidia cards. If his/her 'problem' was in purchasing Nvidia cards, then what would your recommendation be for creating such a setup be?
- jeffasinger 13y agoNot the OP, but I think the open source AMD drivers support both DisplayPort and Dual Link DVI, so there's probably several cards from them that would work.
- foxhill 13y agoso, you're saying that anyone that wants reasonable 3D performance, 2+ displays, and GPGPU support can go fuck themselves? :/ don't get me wrong, open source is great. we need it now more than ever. but this is exactly the wrong sort of attitude to take.
- supergauntlet 13y agoThere's always AMD. The open source AMD drivers are great for the 5000 and 6000 series, and support for the 7000 (and by extension 9000) series is getting better. If you're interested in compute just pick up a 5850 or 5770 from a friend, they're cheap (if you can find them) and they run well with the open source drivers, and have support for at least 3 monitors. My 6850 has 2 DVIs, an HDMI and 2 miniDPs, I can drive 4 monitors at once with it.
- vacri 13y agoI would counter that the AMD drivers are not great. I got a whitebox last year with a 5770, and the experience was terrible. The open source drivers couldn't do 3D acceleration properly, and the proprietary drivers refused to do dual-screen - the maximum available resolution across desktops was a square 1920x1920. In my experience, nvidia has been providing a superior linux experience in the trenches for the past couple of years. The 'amd is good for linux' seems to be an emotion from yesteryear.
- davexunit 13y agoI just use the nouveau drivers. They perform well enough, cause me far less xorg.conf headaches, and are free.
- banachtarski 13y agoThis is still a reason to cause upset though. A small minority of linux users actually care about GPU programming and 3D acceleration and rely on proprietary drivers. Nouveau is improving but nowhere near commercial grade (this is largely Nvidia's fault as well).
- davexunit 13y agoI agree. It's yet another instance of Nvidia not playing nice with the Linux community.
- cookiecaper 13y agoI don't know. ATI has been "playing nice with the Linux community" for several years now, and their free drivers still don't approach the performance of the proprietary drivers for most cards (cards 3-4 generations old are starting to perform comparably on both drivers; newer cards are still much slower with the free drivers). I think it's more about resources -- NVIDIA and ATI have lots of money that they put into driver improvements and maintenance, and the radeon and nouveau maintainers primarily have free time after work, occasionally with one or two full-time contributors. If we are serious about open-source driver platforms, we need to figure out how to allocate comparable resources. Some easily accessible tutorials on 3D driver development would probably be helpful. Neither company ever plans to see an open-source driver rival their proprietary within a few years of a card's release, despite their "commitments" and "assistance". ATI's officially stated strategy is that they provide documentation so that the OSS drivers can provide basic compatibility and functionality, and that their proprietary driver should be used by anyone who has actual performance needs. They're basically offloading the onerous maintenance of previous generation hardware on the community. The point is that nvidia is not especially bad. They've graciously given us the only consistently decent video driver on Linux for 10+ years now, despite its closed nature. Let's try not to be too hard on them.
- mkr-hn 13y agoWho is "sandipt" and what is their connection to Nvidia? I don't see any flair or profile information (on the forum) to indicate that this is an actual staff member, or one with authority to comment on the motivations behind this change. I see no basis for all this speculation.
- moocowduckquack 13y ago"Sandpit" sounds like the name given to an account that multiple people may be using in a test environment, rather than something meant as an actual ID.
- wiml 13y ago"sandipt", not "sandpit". I assume it's a first-name-last-initial style username of someone named Sandip.
- amboar 13y agoThe article currently says "Sandpit"
- mkr-hn 13y agoThe name on the forum thread is sandipt. This is what happens when lazy non-journalists fail to do the most basic detail checking. Or seek a more credible source. Or seek an official comment.
- amboar 13y agoYeah, I read through the forum to set whether this was a mistake in the article. I think my point was that the lazy author was the source of confusion of the name.
- nalbyuites 13y agoActually, it is a pretty common Indian name (Sandip or Sandeep). The 't' at the end is probably the first letter of his surname.
- Nux 13y agoMaybe a late response to Linus :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_36yNWw_07g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_36yNWw_07g
- utopkara 13y agoObviously, the feelings are mutual.
- antimora 13y agoThis might seem unrelated but I have a question to the crowd related to 3 monitor setup with Ubuntu. Does anyone know how to use Intel + Nvidia on Ubuntu 12.04 (or later)? I was able to do this in the past with Windows but I can't get it working with Ubuntu.
- fmax30 13y agoI think it is time to reverse the nvidia driver v295 to make way for an open source nvidia driver which supports upto n screens.
- kleiba 13y agoNVidia has a history of not playing nice with Linux. Allow me to point to a small comment Linus Torvalds made on Nvidia a while ago (NSFW): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw&t=1m41s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw&t=1m41s
- mdmarra 13y agoIs it fair to say that this is "due to windows" though? I don't see anything in this article saying that this directive came at the urging of Microsoft or anyone on the Windows team there. It's entirely possible that this can be some internal nVidia political nonsense happening.
- _JamesA_ 13y agoWhat does this mean exactly? I'm currently running an MSI 660 PE Ti with 3 screens in TwinView mode with driver version 319.49. This gives a total desktop of 4960x1920 in landscape-portrait-landscape layout. I would like to get another 660 Ti and add another 3 screens in TwinView. Is that even possible?
- frank_boyd 13y agoIt's probably time to vote with our wallets again.
- dallagi 13y agoDoes this issue affect FreeBSD drivers as well?
- qwerta 13y agoSomething similar with AMD. My flex graphic supports 4 screens. At some point proprietary drivers dropped this and now it only supports 3 screen. Open-source driver works just fine with 4.
- legulere 13y agoAn important rule for software is to not take features away. People will complain even if it's an obscure feature they don't even use.
- static_typed 13y agoIt's something a little like this: "We are altering the deal, pray we do not alter it any further". Closed source, closed negotiating position. When you buy one of these cards, you are already assuming the position to get kicked, you are just hoping not to get kicked too hard or too many times in a row. Doesn't seem like a sensible thing to do really.