nouveau : Open Source 3D acceleration for nVidia cards
 

I came across this site:

http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/

Is Nvidia supporting this development effort (with information or funds or both)?

Re: nouveau : Open Source 3D acceleration for nVidia cards
 

why should they? they are already donating to the open-source nv driver.

Re: nouveau : Open Source 3D acceleration for nVidia cards
 

Except for any accelerated 3D functions.

Re: nouveau : Open Source 3D acceleration for nVidia cards
 

It is quite common in the opensource world to have several projects with the same goal but independent development.
Sometimes this is an advantage because there is competition, different groups may arrive at different solutions, and the end result may be better than with a single team.
In many cases it is just a waste because of double effort in a world where time of good developers is already scarce.

So I am not amazed that there are two groups developing open-source drivers. If it is a good idea, we will only know later.

Re: nouveau : Open Source 3D acceleration for nVidia cards
 

pe1chl: nv is the xorg 'standard' 2D only driver, made mostly by nvidia and heavily obfuscated. Its main purpose is to make users able to use X until they downloaded and installed the drivers from nvidia.

nouveau is an attempt to get open source 2D and 3D drivers, independent from Nvidia.

See the difference?

Re: nouveau : Open Source 3D acceleration for nVidia cards
 

nvidia doesnt have much interrest in 3D accalerated open source drivers, why should they.
They cover ~99.8% of the available market with their closed-source drivers + the 2d nv dirver.

lg Clemens

Re: nouveau : Open Source 3D acceleration for nVidia cards
 

~99.8% of the available market? What market? Intel has 40% the video market, while ATI has 27% and Nvidia has about 20% as of 2Q06:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/d...731234259.html

Re: nouveau : Open Source 3D acceleration for nVidia cards
 

Yeah, that was exaggerative. But a poll on a Czech Linux portal showed about 57% for nVIDIA.

Re: nouveau : Open Source 3D acceleration for nVidia cards
 

I think he meant nvidias target audience in particular.

Re: nouveau : Open Source 3D acceleration for nVidia cards
 

of course I ment nvidias market. What I tried to say is that with open-source 3d drivers nvidia would not sell much more boards.

Furthermore the open-source driver would be never as good/fast as the prorietary one - nvidia won't open all its details which are used for the prorietary one.

lg Clemens

Re: nouveau : Open Source 3D acceleration for nVidia cards
 

Why? Nvidia are already in the number three position in the video market, and in 1-2 years AMD/ATI will have their die-level CPU/GPU. With Intel persuing a similar course, the expectation at this point is that the GPU will simply become a standard integrated on-die component, like the floating point processor and memory management unit has.

Where does that leave Nvidia? Maybe they are just holding out at this point to have some intellectual property at the fire sale. :)

Re: nouveau : Open Source 3D acceleration for nVidia cards
 

OK, so Nvidia are behind Intel in terms of volume of sales. Tried playing any of the latest games on an Intel GPU? Anything with a modern 3d engine just will not run on it. Intel's GPUs are only designed for use in office systems. If you check out the specs on Intel's website, you will find that most of their GPUs handle TnL on the CPU - ouch! Intel have a _long_ way to go to produce anything decent in terms of graphics performance, and they are probably not particularly interested in that market.

I must admit that I am not very familiar with ATI's GPU, having given up on them back in the Rage days - horrible drivers, often needing different drivers for different models. The merger with AMD will certainly be interesting. I see it as an attempt by AMD to attempt to catch up with Nvidia's Nforce chipsets. AMD's own chipsets have never been particularly amazing, and their sales are pretty low.

Your final line does seem to be somewhat at odds with the fact that Nvidia have just released the world's first DX10-capable GPU, and are already sampling mobile versions of this GPU. They also developed the GPUs for some of the games consoles currently on the market. Oh, and GPUs for mobile phones. Frankly, I see Nvidia as being in a pretty health position at the moment. Of course, this could all change, but probably only in the long term.

Nvidia will definitely not open-source their drivers. There is too much proprietary information within the drivers, especially now that we are moving over to such general purpose GPUs. Much of the GPU's functionality is actually in the driver, not built into the hardware (either hardwired or in BIOS). As long as a competitor can gain some advantage from deeper understanding of the workings of the GPU, the drivers will remain close-source.



Cambo