What is Digg?44 Comments
- NtrmDscrptr, on 10/10/2007, -2/+37So what's it going to be, Nvidia?
Are you going to release open specs, or is my next GPU going to be an ATI? - shad0walker, on 10/10/2007, -3/+30Now we just need Nvidia to release their specs and we can ship distro's with proper drivers (No offence to the open source, backwards engineered ones) and have desktop effects on by default for all systems.
- geminitojanus, on 10/10/2007, -0/+20Novell employs a lot of Xorg coders (5 or 6 of them). Three guys from Novell are tag-teaming the DAAMiT RadeonHD driver.
To put it in perspective, most of the other prolific Xorg coders (including the current project leader Keith Packard) work for Intel. ;) - flappysocks, on 10/10/2007, -1/+13Do we get video acceleration yet with mpeg4? Just what's needed for my future linux-XBMC box.
- geminitojanus, on 10/10/2007, -0/+12...Huh? Did I say Novell was in the wrong for helping on Xorg? I'm confused.
I might dislike their politics, and I will never support Mono/Moonlight, but I commend their Xorg and GTK+ work. - ElectricC0wb0y, on 10/10/2007, -0/+12The closed source ATI drivers don't work.. (well)
- Spr0k3t, on 10/10/2007, -3/+13Behold. The power of cheese! Kudos to the developers.
- 4DFX, on 10/10/2007, -11/+18Great news. But after all this time I'm asking myself one question. Why on earth Novell?
- jorgepblank, on 10/10/2007, -2/+9I agree with NerveBand. We're all on the same team here. Novell has helped with tons of things like Mono (Whether you like it or not), Composite Desktops, etc. It's open source, so it's not like we have to take it from Novell, if you could do it yourself go ahead but Novell's the one with the people capable of doing it.
- GMorgan, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7That's the point though. There is no guarantee that the Nvidia binary drivers will still work well for 2.6.40 or whatever in the future. Right now the Nvidia drivers are decent enough but that might not always be the case. Openness gives us the best chance of keeping things working nice.
- trogdoor, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6They are still sub-optimal, there was for instance a known security vulnerability that went unpatched for a long time, there is the fact that they sometimes break with new kernel versions and take a while to be made to work by nvidia. There is the fact that on my PPC machine I can't get 3D acceleration because Nvidia won't make a PPC driver, and nobody can port it for them. There are also legal reasons why it cannot be included on a liveCD enabled by default ( see what happened with korrora ). Binary Blobs are not acceptable, and Nvidia's drivers are only great in comparison to ATI, they are horrible compared to intel's ( which BTW had AIGLX support long before Nvidia among other things ). It's just too bad intel doesn't make high end GPU's.
- waffle_iron, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6Actually, Novell had been working with AMD and the documents for 3 months before the announcement. 8 days after the announcement, they released the work so far.
http://airlied.livejournal.com/50187.html - NerveBand, on 10/10/2007, -7/+13Why Not Novell? Novell has made great strides in open source and needs to be congratulated on that. You keep on baggin on the FUD when in reality, Novell helps the Linux department in more ways than one.
So stop your bashing and go back to your coding. - geminitojanus, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4They're still working on hardware accelerated 2D. Give it time.
- arjie, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Updates. Kernel updates.
- sotopheavy, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4and on the 8th day God said, "let there be gaming on linux!"
- justcursedme, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Sweet. Maybe now we'll get to use the graphics cards to they're fullest under Linux, especially with compiz-fusion packing such a big feature punch. Well done ATI / AMD!
- hexydes, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4If they don't, then the Linux community (a.k.a. the ones in our population that push technology) will migrate to AMD. They will influence the next ring down (the pro-sumers) who will constantly hear, "Well, I won't use any video cards/chipsets that aren't made by AMD", and will follow suit. Then, those people (who are the ones that act as family/friend/co-worker tech support to the rest of the world) will build computers or encourage the masses to buy computers with AMD graphics.
So, you can argue that open-source hardware and the Linux community only make up a small niche of the population, but remember, it is a niche that sends tidal waves of influence through the rest of the tech industry. - QuickeningYak, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4If only nVidia would do the same...
- cynicist, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3And imagine the driver loading at first boot instead of having to install it manually. Thats what makes having open source drivers so great.
- marnaq, on 10/10/2007, -2/+5A 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo to just play a friggin video? Are you out of your mind?
- KibibyteBrain, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2They don't but some distros have mission statements geared toward shipping open source systems. It would be like saying "Why does a dryer have to be natural gas powered to go into the house?". Most of the time, it would be an open preference, but if the purpose of designing the house was to make it an electric-free design, then that would suddenly become important. Many distros are interested in this because they want systems that any programmer can freely use for whatever he wants, end of story.
- LocDawg, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2LISTEN UP NVIDIA!
My next gpu purchase will be an ATI. - fjc8, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1No; just playing 1080p H264 video.
- djauto23, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Well, the license of the Linux kernel does not allow, or it is not clear wether it allows, for binary drivers distributed with the kernel. If I only could have my system without needing to worry about this 3D-acceleration-working-or-not thing, I would be a much happier GNU/Linux user.
- Urusai, on 10/10/2007, -2/+3At least Nvidia's binary drivers are updated and perform well with the latest X updates. Most people just want a working driver, regardless of the openness. ATI wasn't delivering (no support for AIGLX or HD cards, poor performance vs. Windows). Now the FOSS community can get things up to speed. As long as Nvidia continues to support Linux well enough, they really don't have a business case for opening up other than "everyone else is doing it". Maybe they will realize that having people write your drivers for free is cheaper than paying somebody to do it.
- Iam9376, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Not for us mobile users while Intel dominates the mobile market (and thus no AMD cards) :/
- Protoss, on 10/10/2007, -3/+4Yeah I'll stick with Nvidia for the time being. Their Linux drivers work great.
- fjc8, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Yes, that's with 1080p h264/vc1 using the CyberLink decoder. No fancy Windows accelerated drivers. You might need a little bit more CPU to use an open-source codec like ffmpeg, or you could use the win32 codec CoreAVC if that works in mplayer.
And with Intel integrated graphics, you aren't using a whole lot of electricity. Graphics cards are rather expensive power-wise, often using 15w or more at idle (for entry level cards). 15w is the same as the TDP of the entire Intel G33 chipset while using the graphics; its P35 no-graphics version uses *more* power @ 16w. An Intel or AMD CPU with a TDP of 65w or so will use about as much power as GPU acceleration would.
And that "video acceleration" you want is limited, even on Windows. Only VC-1, H264, and MPEG2 are "nearly fully" accelerated on ATI chipsets. MPEG4 isn't. Otherwise, the GPU is getting video processing tasks that often can be better perfomed by the CPU (like deinterlacing on cards that don't support anything beyond bob/weave). - fjc8, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1In addition: By the time video acceleration works well enough on Windows (let alone Linux) that you can depend on hardware decoding, the CPUs should be fast & cool enough that it won't really matter.
- kahrn, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1ahh yes.. have desktop effects enabled for all systems. Isn't that kinda stupid? I mean.. cutting off a lot of *nix's potential audience (on older systems, third world countries, etc..).
- oobuntu, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1when they're working, they are fine. When i do anything like upgrade my kernel (happens a lot), install compiz, etc, then they are a pain in the posterior.
- epu2, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1i don't know, but 720P video works fine on my sempron 2800+
512 MB ram
with 5900 ultra geforce - SteveMax, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1That's one core for Windows, 50% load on the second core for Windows Media Player, and the remaining 50% for the actual H.264, right?
- Aiwanei, on 10/10/2007, -2/+2Yeah but his whole arguement is for Nvidia to release their specs so the distro's can have proper drivers. Nvidia's Linux drivers are heads and tails above ATI's and really don't need to be open sourced to be considered proper drivers.
- insomniac8400, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1I'm sure someone is really going to sue someone giving out a free distribution with video drivers for a ton of money to stop them. It's free, who cares what happens with it.
- kettlechips, on 10/10/2007, -2/+2What the hell kind of question is that?
- flappysocks, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1I didn't rally want a power hungry, heat generating CPU for my HTPC. Besides does 1080p video play ok on a 2.2Ghz ore 2 duo? (Windows accelerated drivers excluded).
- fjc8, on 10/10/2007, -2/+1Just buy a fast CPU (or one easily overclocked to be a fast CPU). You can play all video today with a decent graphics card (Intel integrated graphics works fine) and a fast enough CPU (in Windows, my 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo E4500 does fine with everything I've tried so far)
- ilgaz, on 10/10/2007, -3/+1I wonder when will Novell bind their drivers to Mono and Silverlight. ;) I wouldn't touch anything Novell if I were a Linux user.
At least they decide whether to go chap 11 or end up their sick relationship with Microsoft. - NerveBand, on 10/10/2007, -6/+2Sorry that was directed towards 4DFX, comment system doesnt allow new childs, only sub-childs.
And I support Mono and Moonlight only for the fact that development eases across platforms. .net truly is simplicity. - insomniac8400, on 10/10/2007, -17/+3Why does a driver have to be open source to be included in a distro? If it works, who cares.
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