What is NVIDIA planning to do with XGL/AIGLX

[daou]

Does anyone know how, and if, NVIDIA is planning to support XGL/AIGLX in the near future? It seems ATI will have an edge in this field considering their open source drivers.

[wizdom]

ATI's proprietary drivers: Not implemented.

Open source R300 reverse engineered drivers ("useful"), nothing to with ATI: Not implemented.

Open Source R200 driver: Implemented, but quite buggy. And this is pretty old hardware!

[kraju]

Originally Posted by wizdom

ATI's proprietary drivers: Not implemented.

What is more AMD officialy denied "open-source ATI drivers" rumours. But ATI users love myths. One of them, unfortunately still alive was "ATI cooperates with open source community like none else, they released card specs!". Now we have "ATI will release open source driver".

Pff. ;-)

Don't believe in 100% open graphic drivers for bleeding-edge cards with all of the features supported. That should be considered as a dream only, nothing more. Even recently released Intel drivers are not as pure open source as they announced.

In my opinion NVIDIA gives the best binary driver experience for Linux. ATI has still performance and quality issues. Their fglrx is a LOT slower than original Catalyst, documentation is weak... the good point for ATI is stable monthly release schedule.

Open source is a great idea, but we have to learn how to cooperate with binary only hardware world to prevail without Windows. :-) Corporations like NVIDIA are still learining how to maintain Linux drivers properly and community doesn't always make it easier... let's face "binary modules in kernel violates GPL" case example or lack of rock-stable API for binary modules.

[daou]

Ok, looks like there is a lot of misrepresentation of "open-source" gfx drivers. I have nothing against binary drivers, just a constant fear of support being dropped or delayed in favor of more prevalent platforms.

But ATI aside, what about NVIDIA support for XGL/AIGLX?

[SaguratuS]

Once the texture from pixmap extension is implemented, we'll be able to use AIGLX, which will fix quite a few of the current issues. Sadly, TFP won't be until the 9xxx series, and the release date is unknown (we're hoping late September, could potentially be as late as '07).

To be honest, I really think some serious work needs to be done with nvidia's linux strategy as more users migrate from windows. For high end cards, they're the only way to go at the moment, but if AMD opensources the ATI drivers, you can expect a large market shift to occur within the Linux community.

[Thunderbird]

One small comment regarding TFP, only recently the specification was finalized. A concept version of it was done for some time but a final spec requied lots of testing, finding bugs in the specification and so on. Further Nvidia is planning lots of changes for 9xxx which is why it is a lot of work.

[energyman76b]

Originally Posted by daou

Does anyone know how, and if, NVIDIA is planning to support XGL/AIGLX in the near future? It seems ATI will have an edge in this field considering their open source drivers.

which open drivers?

do you mean the 2d drivers, Dave Airlie is not allowed to release?

And ATI did not relase any specs - they paid a third party to make open drivers - with as little information-leakage as possible.

Face it, ATI sucks. With nvidia, you can use every card with the open nv-driver. With ATI a lot of cards don't even have 2d support.

Everytime somebody buys an ATI card, God kills a kitten. Please, think of the kittens!

[Thunderbird]

Please don't change this thread to some Nvidia/ATI flamewar or some thread whining about Nvidia not releasing TFP support yet. If it continues this way I might have to close it, so be warned.

[elanthis]

NVIDIA already supports AIGLX. They have since way before the X.org/DRI support for AIGLX was even started.

AIGLX is just one component necessary for compositors like Compiz to work. They require Composite, AIGLX, and GLX_texture_from_pixmap. The NVIDIA drivers support the first two components, but not the last.

That bit is supposedly coming in the 9xxx driver series.

[MamiyaOtaru]

Originally Posted by Thunderbird

One small comment regarding TFP, only recently the specification was finalized.

With Xorg 7.1, no? Which was released when?

Further Nvidia is planning lots of changes for 9xxx which is why it is a lot of work.

Which is why it would have been nice to have TFP before 9xxx. Now TFP will be held up by whatever other features will be in 9xxx.

I really want to put in an "at least ..." here so this doesn't come across as pure petulance. At least we will have non-blinking cursors!

[zbiggy]

Originally Posted by Thunderbird

Further Nvidia is planning lots of changes for 9xxx which is why it is a lot of work.

Really? Great!
I hope there will be:
-some kind of video deinterlacing
-hardware accelerated console framebuffer
-XvMC acceleration of MPEG1,4 ;H263
-purevideo support

Compilation of apps takes so much time. Offloading console text output and video clips acceleration to GPU would give me more fluent system. It is always more fun watching these funny videos from the Internet than looking at gcc output and waiting.

There is hw framebuffer driver for geforce chips. If Nvidia could patch this open driver or provide compability code in X driver we could use it. But it is known to have incompabilities now.

[JoshPrismon]

Originally Posted by wizdom

ATI's proprietary drivers: Not implemented.

Open source R300 reverse engineered drivers ("useful"), nothing to with ATI: Not implemented.

Open Source R200 driver: Implemented, but quite buggy. And this is pretty old hardware!

Heh. Well I guess I will have to tell my Myth Box downstairs that has a X600 AIW with a R300 that it shouldn't be able to run Compviz and AIGLX. In fact, I will have to put the 6600GT that I had in there back in and run Buggy XGL on it!

Sorry. R300 works quite well. In fact everything is very solid, my system is running at lower CPU with the R300 driver and XV then the 6600GT and XvMC, and no overscanning at 540P on the ATI via the Audio Authority to boot!

My old nitpick with this card driver combo is that is FSAA and anti aliasing isn't working on the card. That makes XGL and AIGLX seem even solider.

If you want something that just works (forget about the whole open source versus closed ideological arguments -- the quality of the R300 in my experience is awesome from the open source driver) go grab a old ATI and throw the driver on. It sounds like open source guys are having a lot of luck reverse engineering higher end chips as well.

Let's face it. If you just cared about performance for grapics, wouldn't you be running windows in the first place?

(Lest anyone think that I am just mindlessly bashing nVidia here, search for my username. I had a long string of things that I tried to fix/get working properly. I bought the 6600GT explicity for my myth box, and as soon as I can/it works reliably, it will go back into my Myth server... but for right now, the combination of a) No overscan control at all with HDTV, b) no 540P mode, c) No easy way to switch HD modes without overwriting the xorg.conf (minor point) I am willing to go with a lesser card (and the AIW is a vastly inferior card with the exception of beta R300 driver) that just works coming out of the box.