4 ms·

I just use the nouveau drivers. They perform well enough, cause me far less xorg.conf headaches, and are free.

banachtarski 13y ago
This 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 ago
  I agree. It's yet another instance of Nvidia not playing nice with the Linux community.
  - cookiecaper 13y ago
    I 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.
    - marcosdumay 13y ago
      AMD has played nice enough for people to release a stable free driver for their cards, but they haven't released enough information for a fast 3D driver.
      - pantalaimon 13y ago
        What information have they not released?
      - cookiecaper 13y ago
        Right, and people also have released a stable free driver for nvidia cards. ATI made it slightly easier, but the point was that neither one has really embraced the OSS driver scene, and neither one has "played nice" to an extent that deserves special commendation. I don't want to give the impression that I'm ungrateful for the help that ATI offered the implementers of drivers for its cards, but I think when we take all the facts in balance it comes out in a wash or even with nvidia slightly ahead: nvidia has been consistently producing a high-quality, near-performance-parity driver for Linux for a very, very long time now, and it's almost always compatible with new kernel and Xorg versions prior to their release. ATI has given docs for basic functionality in the free drivers, but they've utterly failed to produce good, performant drivers for Linux machines, closed or free, and in fact they are now on the verge of being two Xorg releases behind. nvidia may not have "committed to help the open-source community" until recently, but they've done a great service for Linux by being the only vendor to provide consistent, solid, high-performance drivers for Xorg and the kernel. Intel has shaped up recently and gone full-bore OSS, but nvidia has a much longer track record of good [closed] *nix support.
foxhill 13y ago
OpenCL, CUDA
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Do people really do much heavy lifting with OpenCL/CUDA using cards that they are also using to actually drive browsers? Seems to me like if you are doing serious work with that sort of thing, you probably have dedicated cards for that (if not straight up using Nvidia Tesla cards or similar).
  - rprospero 13y ago
    I don't use OpenCL often enough to justify the expense of a dedicated card, but, when I do use it, it's a life saver to be able to simply run the code on the CAD workstation.
  - nzp 13y ago
    Probably, but that's just one more reason for them not caring about 4 monitor support in non-Windows drivers. From what I've gathered from mailing lists chatter, the very reason Nvidia maintains Linux and FreeBSD drivers is OpenCL/CUDA related work, apparently some big customers demand this (but since I don't really have a source for that, take it with a grain of salt).
  - foxhill 13y ago
    as a developer, whose primary role is in GPGPU programming, i can't give you an accurate answer. i can tell you, however, that the specialist cards typically are only in super-computers. consumer GPUs are typically faster, and significantly cheaper than their HPC counterparts.
  - Sheepshow 13y ago
    I both play video games and experiment with new technologies at home. I don't think it's strange to use the same card for play and research.
barrkel 13y ago
GTX 670 in a motherboard with a UEFI BIOS, running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, the nouveau driver crashes whenever you move a window too quickly. Verified on three machines with identical hardware. AMD doesn't have decent drivers even for Windows. (By decent, I mean less than 1 graphics-related crash on average per year.)
- klodolph 13y ago
  Did you submit a bug? You went to the trouble of verifying it, so I'm hoping so.
- asdasf 13y ago
  I'm always amazed when I see stuff like this. Nvidia's windows drivers crash all the time too. Neither company is capable of producing quality drivers, yet fanboys still want to insist one of the turds is made of gold.
  - taspeotis 13y ago
    > Nvidia's windows drivers crash all the time too Counter anecdote mode: engage! As an owner of many Nvidia cards, I find they crash infrequently, and when they do it's because: * I was running Windows 8 Preview and pre-release Nvidia drivers * There was some sort of hardware problem with my systems I have used four ATI/AMD graphics cards over the years. Not all of them were negative experiences, but none of them were relatively more positive than using Nvidia hardware.
    - dman 13y ago
      Counterpoint - ive found amd drivers to be pretty good on linux and they support multiple rotated monitors and color matching across multiple monitors much better than nvidia.
  - jmcintyre 13y ago
    After using multiple Nvidia and ATI cards on many machines over the years, my anecdote is that ATI drivers crash far more frequently than Nvidia drivers.
baldfat 13y ago
The perforce suffers with nouveau with anything needing fps.

This 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 ago
I agree. It's yet another instance of Nvidia not playing nice with the Linux community.
- cookiecaper 13y ago
  I 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.
  - marcosdumay 13y ago
    AMD has played nice enough for people to release a stable free driver for their cards, but they haven't released enough information for a fast 3D driver.
    - pantalaimon 13y ago
      What information have they not released?
    - cookiecaper 13y ago
      Right, and people also have released a stable free driver for nvidia cards. ATI made it slightly easier, but the point was that neither one has really embraced the OSS driver scene, and neither one has "played nice" to an extent that deserves special commendation. I don't want to give the impression that I'm ungrateful for the help that ATI offered the implementers of drivers for its cards, but I think when we take all the facts in balance it comes out in a wash or even with nvidia slightly ahead: nvidia has been consistently producing a high-quality, near-performance-parity driver for Linux for a very, very long time now, and it's almost always compatible with new kernel and Xorg versions prior to their release. ATI has given docs for basic functionality in the free drivers, but they've utterly failed to produce good, performant drivers for Linux machines, closed or free, and in fact they are now on the verge of being two Xorg releases behind. nvidia may not have "committed to help the open-source community" until recently, but they've done a great service for Linux by being the only vendor to provide consistent, solid, high-performance drivers for Xorg and the kernel. Intel has shaped up recently and gone full-bore OSS, but nvidia has a much longer track record of good [closed] *nix support.

foxhill 13y ago

OpenCL, CUDA

jlgreco 13y ago
Do people really do much heavy lifting with OpenCL/CUDA using cards that they are also using to actually drive browsers? Seems to me like if you are doing serious work with that sort of thing, you probably have dedicated cards for that (if not straight up using Nvidia Tesla cards or similar).
- rprospero 13y ago
  I don't use OpenCL often enough to justify the expense of a dedicated card, but, when I do use it, it's a life saver to be able to simply run the code on the CAD workstation.
- nzp 13y ago
  Probably, but that's just one more reason for them not caring about 4 monitor support in non-Windows drivers. From what I've gathered from mailing lists chatter, the very reason Nvidia maintains Linux and FreeBSD drivers is OpenCL/CUDA related work, apparently some big customers demand this (but since I don't really have a source for that, take it with a grain of salt).
- foxhill 13y ago
  as a developer, whose primary role is in GPGPU programming, i can't give you an accurate answer. i can tell you, however, that the specialist cards typically are only in super-computers. consumer GPUs are typically faster, and significantly cheaper than their HPC counterparts.
- Sheepshow 13y ago
  I both play video games and experiment with new technologies at home. I don't think it's strange to use the same card for play and research.

barrkel 13y ago

GTX 670 in a motherboard with a UEFI BIOS, running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, the nouveau driver crashes whenever you move a window too quickly. Verified on three machines with identical hardware. AMD doesn't have decent drivers even for Windows. (By decent, I mean less than 1 graphics-related crash on average per year.)

klodolph 13y ago
Did you submit a bug? You went to the trouble of verifying it, so I'm hoping so.
asdasf 13y ago
I'm always amazed when I see stuff like this. Nvidia's windows drivers crash all the time too. Neither company is capable of producing quality drivers, yet fanboys still want to insist one of the turds is made of gold.
- taspeotis 13y ago
  > Nvidia's windows drivers crash all the time too Counter anecdote mode: engage! As an owner of many Nvidia cards, I find they crash infrequently, and when they do it's because: * I was running Windows 8 Preview and pre-release Nvidia drivers * There was some sort of hardware problem with my systems I have used four ATI/AMD graphics cards over the years. Not all of them were negative experiences, but none of them were relatively more positive than using Nvidia hardware.
  - dman 13y ago
    Counterpoint - ive found amd drivers to be pretty good on linux and they support multiple rotated monitors and color matching across multiple monitors much better than nvidia.
- jmcintyre 13y ago
  After using multiple Nvidia and ATI cards on many machines over the years, my anecdote is that ATI drivers crash far more frequently than Nvidia drivers.

baldfat 13y ago

The perforce suffers with nouveau with anything needing fps.