is the nvidia driver falling behind?

[xazero]

is it just me or the nvidia driver is rapidly getting outdated? i know they are bleeding edge as for opengl 4, cuda, opencl and that, but what about KMS XRandR 1.2 (and 1.3) Gallium3D and XRender performance (i.e. kde4 is still slow). i know that some of those haven't been implemented due to license issues but anyway i think nvidia should do something to overcome those problems.

I think that nvidia hasn't realized that Linux isn't a server/business/developers/science/boring OS anymore and as such the needs of the OS have changed and now we need things like KDE4 working properly and we just want to open the system settings to configure a secondary screen or the rotation, also we might want to use wined3d* to play games and of curse we want our plymouth screen working.

is just my personal opinion, what do you guys think?

*it works but i think (not sure) that gallium3d could improve performance.

[miki100]

I think the same as you - these are already(if I'm not mistaken) "Linux standards", and it could bring many improvements.

[hl_]

Originally Posted by xazero

KMS [...] Gallium3D

These are just buzzwords, nothing more.

Xrandr support indeed is lacking, but Xrender acceleration is working very well. I'd say NVidia's drivers overall have the best XRender implementation of all existing drivers.

[adamk75]

Originally Posted by hl_

These are just buzzwords, nothing more.

They are not buzzwords. They are new technology in the world of open source graphics. However, they are also completely inapplicable to the nvidia driver, which already provides much of the same functionality. The only thing that jumps out at me as missing from the the nvidia driver would be a text console at your monitors native resolution. The nvidia driver already supports a memory manager and quite robust support for shaders.

Adam

[Lysius]

I also see that the main thing that is missing is a fbdev driver. That should give you the features of KMS. I guess one problem here would be the needed changes to the installer because the driver would be in use even if X were not started…

XRandR would be nice but is no real show stopper when I consider the features of NVIDIA X Server Settings and dynamic TwinView.

I can not complain about XRender performance.

[adamk75]

Originally Posted by Lysius

XRandR would be nice but is no real show stopper when I consider the features of NVIDIA X Server Settings and dynamic TwinView.

Is it still impossible to rotate just one screen with twinview?

Adam

[kRogue]

As for Qt...

I deal with Qt ALOT, I have to walk it's source code ALOT, I deal with it a great deal in the embedded world. Here is the beans:
(1) Qt's GL backends are junk. Qt 4.5.x was bad, really bad. Starting in Qt 4.6 there have been significant improvements with the GL2 backend(but not the GL1 backend), but in all honesty the GL2 back end is still junk. The reason: the QPainter API does not map well at all to GL (or for that matter D3D). Additionally, there are a great deal of bits in the implementation that produce ugly render results and are slow (rotated text is particularly guilty here).

(2) KDE4 uses Qt and some of the way it uses Qt are bad too... Qt advises to not use QtGraphicsProxyWidget, oh but KDE4 does. Naughty.

On another note, that KDE4 is slow, but other desktop environments perform well, is that not a clue that maybe it is Qt and KDE, not the drivers?

As far as features go:
1) NVIDIA control panel makes it a breeze to rotate the screen, change resolutions, setup multiple monitors, etc. In fact, I have found it much easier than Windows 7 interface.

2) GL performance between MS-Windows and Linux are more or less that same, so much that same that if you find a GL bug on Linux, it will be there in MS-Windows and vica-versa.

I've stated this before, I used KDE in the 3.x days.. and I have tried KDE4.x regularly and recent ones no less... I cannot stand KDE4. It does not help me be more efficient. The widget thing is mostly useless toy-junk. Oh yes, it runs badly.

Also keep in mind, X is old, really freaking, butt-spanking old. A great deal of the extensions for X are no longer a good idea and bad for modern hardware (XDamage and XVideo I am looking at right at you). I am not saying X is garbage (though some do feel that way), but some of the assumptions built into X's design are not a good way to interface to hardware (I am particularly staring at the embedded world with GL ES2 and GL3.2 hardware). In truth, it is a testament to it's amazing design that we are still using X, the protocol and design are from what, 1987?

[adamk75]

Originally Posted by kRogue

On another note, that KDE4 is slow, but other desktop environments perform well, is that not a clue that maybe it is Qt and KDE, not the drivers?

That logic works the other way, too. If KDE4 is slow with nvidia, but not the open source intel and radeon drivers, is that not a clue that it maybe is the drivers and not Qt and KDE?

Most likely it is a combination of both the drivers and the DE. The toolkit is probably assuming nvidia is accelerating that it's not accelerating.

[tadawson]

Heck, I'd be happy to just be able to run my pair of 9800's in SLI *AND* my onboard 780 *AT THE SAME TIME* like I can do trivially on "that other platform" . . . .

- Tim

[Drolfrawd]

Ati is buggy
/

[gisl]

Originally Posted by kRogue

On another note, that KDE4 is slow, but other desktop environments perform well, is that not a clue that maybe it is Qt and KDE, not the drivers?

Might be that other DEs do not use advanced graphics, and these advanced operations are poorly implemented by the driver.

Originally Posted by kRogue

As far as features go:
1) NVIDIA control panel makes it a breeze to rotate the screen, change resolutions, setup multiple monitors, etc. In fact, I have found it much easier than Windows 7 interface.

The thing about xrandr is that it can be setup mostly *automatically*.

I have a very simple setup: a laptop that is used either at work with an external display, or at home with just the internal display. At work, the external display should be the primary. At home, the laptop display needs to be the primary of course, as there is no other display.

I use suspend to disk/ram when moving between home and office, and keep all my applications (Lotus Notes, Eclipse, lots of browsers, editors, terminal window, ...) open all the time, because it would take a lot of time to restore all that.

When moving from home to office, KDE4 detects the new external display and allows to automatically enable it and make it the primary screen. When moving back home, the external display is no longer available, so the primary screen is switched back to the internal display. The panel and all windows are immediately visible on the laptop display.

Sounds pretty normal to me, but that *only works* with my old ATI Radeon Mobility card.

Now what happes with my NViDIA card? The dual monitor is set up to one big non-xrandr screen. I *have* to run nvidia-settings in order to enable/disable the screens. I have to manually use nvidia-settings in order to change the primary screen. As this is just one big screen, the desktop environment does not get notified about the change, and as such, the panel and all other windows will stay on the unavailable screen. In other words, my DE shows a blank screen without a panel; all applications are still running, but invisible.

So: please, please add xrandr support!

Thanks,
Carsten

[TheBlackCat]

Originally Posted by kRogue

(1) Qt's GL backends are junk. Qt 4.5.x was bad, really bad. Starting in Qt 4.6 there have been significant improvements with the GL2 backend(but not the GL1 backend), but in all honesty the GL2 back end is still junk. The reason: the QPainter API does not map well at all to GL (or for that matter D3D). Additionally, there are a great deal of bits in the implementation that produce ugly render results and are slow (rotated text is particularly guilty here).

Are you referring to the GL backends that are still marked as experimental and which the folks at Qt strongly discourage people from using?

Originally Posted by kRogue

(2) KDE4 uses Qt and some of the way it uses Qt are bad too... Qt advises to not use QtGraphicsProxyWidget, oh but KDE4 does. Naughty.

On another note, that KDE4 is slow, but other desktop environments perform well, is that not a clue that maybe it is Qt and KDE, not the drivers?

Except that the problems only occur on Nvidia drivers, and they are not unique to KDE or Qt (Firefox has been having a lot of the same problems on Nvidia with Linux as KDE/Qt).

Originally Posted by kRogue

1) NVIDIA control panel makes it a breeze to rotate the screen, change resolutions, setup multiple monitors, etc. In fact, I have found it much easier than Windows 7 interface.

Except the windows 7 interface, if I recall correctly, supports user-level settings that are remembers across sessions (as do standard xrandr GUI's in Linux). That means you can set your display configuration for each user independently without administrator access and still have them when you reboot.

Nvidia's settings, on the other hand, are lost on reboot unless you make changes to you Xorg.conf file, and such settings are global and require root access. There is no user-level settings at all.

In fact most distros don't even use an xorg.conf file anymore because usually it is not needed, autodetection combined with user-level controls have made it unnecessary for people using most other drivers. Most other drivers are using standard Linux interfaces, allowing developers to develop a standard set of controls that work with a broad variety of drivers instead of having to have different configuration dialogs or different backends depending on the driver you are using. Whether nvidia-settings and twinview work as well or not is irrelevant (although in my opinion they don't), why can't we just use the same tools everyone else uses?