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How sad to see all this work go into performance while it is impossible to get a graphic card that had open source Linux drivers (at least ones that work 100% o

by annnnd 12y ago

How sad to see all this work go into performance while it is impossible to get a graphic card that had open source Linux drivers (at least ones that work 100% of the time). And I'm talking about suspend function, not about some advanced games. I mean, how difficult can it be?

valarauca1 12y ago
Actually very. Lets go back in time to the modern days of the early to mid 90's. GPU's were very new. Back in that day if you wanted to interface with a GPU you had to know what language it spoke. Every company had their own language, architecture, etc. So if you made software you had to make a different version for each hardware GPU. Case and point 5 version of MechWarrior, 1 version for each GPU company on the market. :.:.: Eventually we got Glide, Mantle, DirectX, and OpenGL. These aimed to standardize our interface to the GPU so that the GPU hardware guys can focus on building blindingly fast vector processors with no regard to architecture backwards compatibility, etc. Want to completely change register layout every 2 years? No problem. Want to redo caching every 18 months? No problem. This has lend to blindingly fast GPU scaling. And the market exploding as GPU's currently lead in GFLOPS/watt. Also allows for average customers to have access to TFLOPS level of computing which in turn have us the currently growing open science and data initiatives. :.:.: Pandora was let out of their box, its going to be very hard to put them back in. DirectX/OpenGL is more or less a Compiler for the byte code that LLVM/GCC generates for 3D acceleration. This byte code is then compiled into native code for the GPU based on the GPU driver for DirectX/OpenGL. This is the problem. Your GPU isn't a device, so much a fully feature complete computer that is programmed on the fly by your CPU.
- singlow 12y ago
  But what does that have to do with making the suspend features work? I get it that keeping the 3d performance up with open source drivers is hard. But why can't nvidia help out the open source drivers with the basics like sleep/suspend/refresh/resolution etc.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - MrDom 12y ago
    Money. They release proprietary drivers, but Linux isn't a big enough segment of their client base for them to spend a ton of time and money getting the drivers right. If there was a linux based distro that was able to compete with Apple and Microsoft, then things might be different.

by annnnd 12y ago

valarauca1 12y ago

Actually very. Lets go back in time to the modern days of the early to mid 90's. GPU's were very new. Back in that day if you wanted to interface with a GPU you had to know what language it spoke. Every company had their own language, architecture, etc. So if you made software you had to make a different version for each hardware GPU. Case and point 5 version of MechWarrior, 1 version for each GPU company on the market. :.:.: Eventually we got Glide, Mantle, DirectX, and OpenGL. These aimed to standardize our interface to the GPU so that the GPU hardware guys can focus on building blindingly fast vector processors with no regard to architecture backwards compatibility, etc. Want to completely change register layout every 2 years? No problem. Want to redo caching every 18 months? No problem. This has lend to blindingly fast GPU scaling. And the market exploding as GPU's currently lead in GFLOPS/watt. Also allows for average customers to have access to TFLOPS level of computing which in turn have us the currently growing open science and data initiatives. :.:.: Pandora was let out of their box, its going to be very hard to put them back in. DirectX/OpenGL is more or less a Compiler for the byte code that LLVM/GCC generates for 3D acceleration. This byte code is then compiled into native code for the GPU based on the GPU driver for DirectX/OpenGL. This is the problem. Your GPU isn't a device, so much a fully feature complete computer that is programmed on the fly by your CPU.

singlow 12y ago
But what does that have to do with making the suspend features work? I get it that keeping the 3d performance up with open source drivers is hard. But why can't nvidia help out the open source drivers with the basics like sleep/suspend/refresh/resolution etc.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- MrDom 12y ago
  Money. They release proprietary drivers, but Linux isn't a big enough segment of their client base for them to spend a ton of time and money getting the drivers right. If there was a linux based distro that was able to compete with Apple and Microsoft, then things might be different.