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38 Comments
- sqrt7744, on 10/11/2007, -0/+24I wonder if a fairly successful Nouveau project would convince NVIDIA to open source their official drivers. It hasn't worked that way with ATI, but who know...
Anyway, this project is awesome: keep up the good work. - GMorgan, on 10/11/2007, -0/+22Unfortunately it's the 10% they have left that will be 90% of the work. As they always say first you do the first 90%, then you do the second 90%.
However we should see something working just that it will take them an age to get to the standards of the Nvidia driver. This is one hell of a project and that we are achieving anything in this difficult area speaks volumes of the OSS process. Especially since ATI at least have been down right hostile thus far. - GMorgan, on 10/11/2007, -0/+20ATI have been highly annoying. They have actually stood in the way of OSS driver development, taking months to sign off a simply 500 line patch for the R500 driver.
- Spr0k3t, on 10/11/2007, -1/+17It will be so nice to ditch these closed source drivers. I just wish nVidia would get off their high horse and cooperate with these guys to help speed up the development.
- bigtomrodney, on 10/11/2007, -1/+14It's a work in progress so your cynicism doesn't make you sound big or clever. And yes NV4x will run composited desktops.
- schestowitz, on 10/11/2007, -5/+18Hopefully proprietary software/hardware companies will notget the satisfaction of having volunteers clean up the mess that they leave. There are other routes, but it may take several years to become a reality.
First Open Graphics board appears
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36761
Timothy Miller, Open Graphics Project
http://linuxgazette.net/130/ruecker.html
Never say never. - jhuebel, on 10/11/2007, -2/+14In my experience, Nvidia tries to be as helpful as possible to OSS developers. When I say "as possible", I mean that they are bound by some intellectual property constraints with technology they've licensed from other companies. This has been true for a long time. When I was Lead Dev for Gentoo/amd64, I talked with Nvidia a number of times. They're very nice, but they were also very consistent about what information they could or could not release. They simply aren't able to release ALL information about their hardware. That sucks, to be sure. But Nvidia is having to work within intellectual properties laws just like anybody else.
- GMorgan, on 10/11/2007, -0/+11It's no more complex than say Core 2. The problem is we have documentation on Core 2. Intel sent me massive tomes on the subject for free just because I asked. We have to reverse engineer the video cards and that is much more difficult.
- Ramble, on 10/11/2007, -1/+9Good luck to them, they're going to need it.
- inactive, on 10/11/2007, -0/+813 years ago you could use the same argument with linux: "the open source operating system unfortunately have to fail because of the huge lack of capital and the immense bunch of technology that has already been invented by the monopolists microsoft and apple. :'("
And we all know how the story has ended :) - GMorgan, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7There are better ATI OSS drivers than we have Nvidia ones. However for obvious reasons most of us run Nvidia cards so Nouveau should be more of an issue.
- jhuebel, on 10/11/2007, -2/+9Despite what you might believe, they aren't "on their high horse". Nvidia has licensed technology from other companies and must comply with intellectual property laws in that regard. I've dealt with them in the past (as Lead Dev for Gentoo/amd64) and they're very helpful to the open source community-- to a point. Their hands are tied when it comes to certain aspects of their hardware. I don't blame them for that, really. In order to be competitive in the graphics market (as well as avoid IP lawsuits), they're forced to license technology from other companies. It would simply be too expensive to develop all the technology themselves that is required to give you your whiz-bang gaming experience.
- harlowsmonkeys, on 10/11/2007, -2/+8Monopolists ATI *AND* Nvidia? It's kind of hard to have two monopolists in the same market.
- GMorgan, on 10/11/2007, -0/+6We already have OSS drivers for all Intel cards and yes they can run composited desktops. Intel claims their next card will be a top level competitor and it will have fully OSS drivers from the beginning.
Intel have been really cool the last few years. - inactive, on 10/11/2007, -2/+8At least the propietary nvidia drivers are useful, if only ati could imitate them i wouldn't care if the drivers are close or not.
- patpi, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5the story hasn't ended :D
- fkr3, on 10/11/2007, -2/+6Why don't you ask Intel to make some video chipsets that are on par with nVidia and ATI? Intel dominates-by-price the video card market in laptops and a big chunk of desktops anyway.
I refuse to believe the #1 cpu maker can' make a decent gpu. - JonForTheWin, on 10/11/2007, -2/+6>Nvidia has licensed technology from other companies and must comply with intellectual property laws in that regard.
Please name this company. Chances are that as usual: VENDOR IS LYING - JonForTheWin, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4>When I say "as possible", I mean that they are bound by some intellectual property constraints with technology they've licensed from other companies.
Can you name these companies or even one of them?
Nvidia _EASILY_ has the resources to acquire this "intellectual property" (you mean PATENTS?). So as it goes and as it still goes, ***** Nvidia and AMD[ati]. - Latka, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3Tipical cockiness by a new car owner :P
You know, Half Life 2 works on a TNT 2 card, not everything a few years old is useless. - Kr4t05, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Probably not targeted at someone who needs a massive amount of graphics power. Last time I checked, kernel hackers didn't require a beastly video card.
All joking aside, I have to applaud the efforts of the Nouveau team. Granted, I'm still sticking with the proprietary drivers (for now), but I'll gladly jump on the FOSS boat when these drivers work with Compiz-Fusion and UT3. :P - greyfade, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3SGI, Creative (through 3D Labs), HP, Microsoft, S3 (now VIA)... The list is almost as long as the OpenGL ARB membership.
- arjie, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1@JonForTheWin: Someone else who knows more than I do did point out some things that nvidia can do nothing about. I remember partly about something related to the licence for the S3 Texture Compression being just one of many such things.
It was in one of the older threads about nouveau - greyfade, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1more precisely, the driver "radeon" has 3D, while the "nv" driver does not.
that's not to say the radeon driver is a good one. in fact, i understand it's much worse than the closed ATi driver. - regeya, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Well, there's already an OSS ATI driver set, it's just that the drivers don't work for everyone. To tell the truth, though, it mostly doesn't work for people with cheap and/or mobile ATI cards. I'm in the former camp. Which basically means I don't have working drivers, as I can't use the ATI drivers either. D'oh!
- GMorgan, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2Well the problem before is that there really was no reason to write OSS 3D drivers. Hell 3 years ago SVGA2 would have probably been plenty for most Linux users. Now we have composited desktops we need 3D drivers, just look at the difference done in only a year since compositing started to become viable. 2 years from now us lot will be talking about 3D driver hell and x-server crashes after kernel updates in hindsight and the new users will be going 'eh, what are they talking about?'.
- greyfade, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2Some of these patents are owned by companies who don't have the means to open them (whether due to sub-licensing or other constraints) or by companies that are *hostile* to opening them (i.e., Microsoft, who "owns" part of the fragment shader specification). SGI, Microsoft, HP, VIA, and Creative all own IP that NVIDIA is licensing for their driver, and there are other parts of it that NVIDIA did not sub-license but that still have major questions as to their ownership or legal status. Just a quick glance through NVIDIA's OpenGL extension specs (on developer.nvidia.com) reveals several extensions for which "ownership" isn't clear.
There is also the issue of whether NVIDIA's own executive leadership and their legal department would sign off on the whole open source thing. It seems the only reason the Linux Forcedeth drivers were abandoned in favor of the open drivers is that they were so complete. If Nouveau gets to that same level of development, NVIDIA would surely sign off on those drivers and may even support them. - jhuebel, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1I have to admit, I'm not particularly found of ATi either. Nvidia has consistently been more helpful to the OSS community that ATi has. ATi was also much slower to provide linux drivers for their hardware than Nvidia.
- greyfade, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1And as far as their video cards go, it's about ***** time they developed a discrete chip worth buying. None of their past "3D" hardware is worth even pissing on.
- appel, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0Then why not enlighten us with an official statement and clear it up once and for all?
- jhuebel, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1Yes, I mean patents you tard. Intellectual Property is protected by patents and copyright. Whether you like it or not, it exists. Just because YOU don't like it doesn't mean a company can ignore the law. Not if they intend to remain in business.
- austin987, on 10/11/2007, -1/+0I've been wondering what's happened to this project. I tried sending them a dump a couple weeks ago, and I never get a reply. Wonder how many others this has happened to...
- fkr3, on 10/11/2007, -8/+5Might take more than several years... you guys are struggling to replicate which is a whole lot easier than innovate.
"Xillinx Spartan-3 comes with a 128-bit memory interface, offering memory bandwidth of 1.6 GB/s (more than GeForce2 GTS and Radeon 7000, whose perfomance are being targeted by project developers)."
More than a Geforce 2. I used to own a Geforce 2... 6 or 7 years ago. - inactive, on 10/11/2007, -7/+2good. now do ATI
- cquilliam, on 10/11/2007, -11/+5I'm so sick of hearing this. Any time there is a post regarding Nvidia/ATI with regards to Linux, there is always that yahoo that "suggests" that they open source their driver. People need to get it through their heads that they can't. As jhuebel said, they are bound by the property of other companies. ITS NOT THEIR CHOICE.. gah.
- wofldibofl, on 10/11/2007, -9/+1sorry, but i have to agree with that, the open graphics projects unfortunately have to fail because of the huge lack of capital and the imense bunch of technology that has already been invented by the monopolists ati and nvidia. :'(
- Urusai, on 10/11/2007, -13/+4NVidia already has fine (proprietary) drivers. It seems that working on open-source ATI drivers would be more useful.
- Noctem, on 10/11/2007, -13/+2Wow, NV4x series? Will that even run a composited desktop?
This is a great idea and all, and good luck, but video hardware is incredibly complex, much more so than any of the other subsystems in a computer. I doubt this project will get nVidia to open their drivers.
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