I'm looking forward to the day...
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| caitlyn Feb 14, 2012 9:29 AM EDT |
I'm looking forward to the day when nouveau is so good that nobody cares about the proprietary drivers anymore. Am I dreaming? |
| mbaehrlxer Feb 14, 2012 12:00 PM EDT |
maybe, but dreams can become true. i have the same dream... greetings, eMBee. |
| Steven_Rosenber Feb 14, 2012 12:17 PM EDT |
I don't know about Nvidia/Nouveau, but in my experience, Catalyst for AMD on a running Linux system was a nightmare. I don't think performance improved, and it could very well have regressed on my hardware/distro combo, and updates were a nightmare. Going back to the open driver under the distro's own package management (Fedora at the time) was the answer. At that time, the RPM Fusion project was months behind on packaging Catalyst (they kept up to date for Nvidia's proprietary driver), and wading into the Catalyst package from AMD was a bad thing to do to an installed system and its user (that would be me). |
| JaseP Feb 14, 2012 12:36 PM EDT |
Open drivers are almost always better for system stability. Quality, that's another thing. |
| Koriel Feb 14, 2012 1:09 PM EDT |
Catalyst is seriously bad and folks should really stay away from AMD/ATI on Linux.
The catalyst drivers have given me so much trouble on linux I simply relegated the card to a Windows only machine. Im afraid Nouveau for me has not been a great experience either I have a NV6800 & NV7300 based cards both exhibit the same problems under Nouveau which cause X to crash intermittently on startup when I login into my DE on Linux Mint, I know its going to crash if the screen flickers twice then boom, it doesn't do it every time though. Ive managed to narrow it down and it seems to be related to dual monitor support, when I run in single monitor mode everything is fine. Replacing with the NVidia binary drivers fixes the problem permanently no flickering and no crashing on dual monitor setup. |
| Steven_Rosenber Feb 14, 2012 5:34 PM EDT |
Nobody mentioned Intel. I will. The decision NOT to split the drivers into "new Intel" and "old Intel" when kernel mode setting entered the picture made life h#ll for those with older Intel video chips. I had plenty of trouble just getting the machine to display anything for a good long time and do so now only through bootline/Grub hackery that shouldn't be required of first-time users. So ... can we agree that AMD/ATI, NVidia and Intel are all just varying degrees of messed up in Linux? That's a bad, bad thing. |
| BernardSwiss Feb 14, 2012 8:26 PM EDT |
For what it's worth, I've had much better luck with AMD/ATI than NVIDIA cards -- but then I've always (ie. ever since I switched to Linux) been happy to use older hardware, and I value stability over the ability to play graphics-intensive video games. (If it'll run Tux Racer, it's probably good enough for me. My "hot" graphics card right now is a Radeon X1950, with the open driver) |
| Koriel Feb 15, 2012 12:40 AM EDT |
@Bernard I bet your card uses the old open source Radeon driver which is pretty much rock solid. Even the old open source Nv 2D driver is better for me than the Nouveau driver. But yeh video drivers from the top card makers are a mess on linux. |
| jezuch Feb 15, 2012 2:51 AM EDT |
Nouveau has been good enough for my laptop at work for some time now. And the open Radeon driver has been good enough for my home computer for some time. But I guess that's because I don't play "modern" 3D games. Oolite work just fine ;) |
| Khamul Feb 15, 2012 4:44 PM EDT |
I'm using Nouveau at the moment, but it's not great at all, since I can't really play any 3D games. And the games I want to play are nothing high-end; we're talking TuxRacer and Neverball here. It'll play (which is an improvement over a year or two ago, where it just died with an error saying I needed 3D graphics hardware), but it's so slow it's totally unusable, i.e. single-digit FPS rates. |
| ColonelPanik Feb 16, 2012 12:30 PM EDT |
Open Source Hardware? Just one item, graphics card, would save a lot of headaches. |
| Khamul Feb 16, 2012 2:07 PM EDT |
An open-source graphics card would only be useful on a desktop PC (notebooks have their graphics integrated), and even then where on earth would you get it fabricated? TSMC probably requires a pretty hefty downpayment to start fabbing GPU chips, and I seriously doubt you'd get any kind of worthwhile performance out of an FPGA. |
| JaseP Feb 16, 2012 2:13 PM EDT |
There are lots of headaches,... graphics, sound, wireless, touch screen controllers, cameras, phone function, etc. But you realize the closed chipsets help keep certain players in business, right?!?! |
| Khamul Feb 16, 2012 2:28 PM EDT |
The closed chipsets exist because making your own hardware is totally non-trivial, unlike making your own software. Even for something simple like a sound chip, it's a lot cheaper to just buy an off-the-shelf chip that was designed by professionals than to try to build your own; the best you could do is use an FPGA to do the logic stuff, and then implement the analog stuff in discrete circuitry (op-amps, etc.), which will end up being a rather large add-in card. Why bother when every system now comes with a small audio chip built-in? With the closed chipsets, the only challenge is getting them to work with open drivers, which either requires specs or reverse engineering. This, in most cases, is a much smaller problem than re-engineering your own sound card, and being limited in so many ways (i.e. not being able to fab your own ASIC, and having to use an FPGA), and on top of that is much, much cheaper for most users. Who wants to pay $250 for a specially-made open hardware sound card when they can just use the hardware built into their PC or notebook for free? It's like this for most of these closed chipsets you mention. Reverse-engineering a device driver, while not trivial (look at the effort that was needed to reverse-engineer Broadcom wireless chipsets), is still a lot less work than designing custom hardware for one of these tasks, and interested software engineers are easier to come by than competent hardware engineers willing to do this stuff. The one real problem is graphics chips. As we've seen from the open-source driver efforts, not to mention the sheer size of these drivers, the effort needed to make a graphics chip driver is far, far more than that needed for, say, a touchscreen controller or sound chip, where all you have to do is read and write a few registers. Even so, however, as difficult a task as creating open-source graphics drivers is, it'd be far, far more effort and money to create an open-hardware GPU that rivals even the lowest-end Nvidia chip, and you'll probably still get worse performance than you would just buying a decent Nvidia chip and using today's (slow) Nouveau driver on it. It costs several billion dollars to build a fab that can make GPU chips, and millions of dollars to have a foundry like TSMC make one for you (this is what Nvidia does; they don't have their own fabs like Intel), not to mention all the specialized tools and knowledge needed to create and test the RTL, generate masks, etc. Most "open hardware" seems to depend on the usage of FPGAs for actually implementing the "hardware". But you're not going to get the performance out of an FPGA needed to come close to modern GPUs, and again it'd be much cheaper and easier and more performant to just buy a mid-line (or even higher) Nvidia card and run Nouveau on it. |
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