OT: nVidia driver [was: Wish list] -- understanding the GPU market

[Per Bjornsson]

On Wed, 2005-06-08 at 15:12 -0500, Bryan J. Smith  wrote:
> Little Davie Jones wrote:  
> > FWIW, I picked up a PCI-E Radeon X300 for not-many-beans recently.
> > It works out of the box with FC4, with no need for proprietory drivers.
> > The 3d isn't supported yet ... <BIG TIME CUT>
> 
> Please replace "PCI-E Radeon X300" with "PCI-E GeForce 6800" and
> retype that and it will be the _exact_same_ logic.

Do they actually have a matching feature set? ATI seems much more
involved in the development of their 2D driver; as Dave Jones pointed
out, it' just one guy apparently in his spare time for the nv driver.

> nVidia _does_ put people on the MIT "nv" driver, and 2D _does_ work
> with their newest NV4x series of cards -- typically in about the same 
> development time as the ATI "radeon" and other drivers.

Well, as you mentioned, at one point they did contribute some code to
Utah-GLX (at least it ended up there, I don't know what Nvidia
originally did with it but the copyright/license statements do indicate
an Nvidia origin). It seems to work basically up to GeForce2/GeForce4MX
class cards. However, Nvidia stopped touching this stuff well before
those cards came along. Since they had already published the code and
minor fiddling and tweaks got it to work with some newer hardware, how
is it not a business decision to stop doing open-source 3D (at least at
that support level): it seems that they could do the fancy, IP-
encumbered stuff in a proprietary driver, and a decent basic-3D
implementation in a free driver.

By the way, someone is poking at the stuff in Utah-GLX, although on
Haiku (BeOS clone):
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/be-hold/BeOS/NVdriver/index.html

> Also note that the X300 is a prior series R300, and not the latest
> R400.  It's like comparing to a GeForce FX5700LE.

How sure are you about that? According to the DRI site it's an "rv370";
as far as I can tell this seems to be more like a crippled r400 or so
than the original r300s?

In any case, the point is actually moot, since the driver seems to work
with the _definitely_ r400-class and still fairly hot X800 (apparently
r420 or similar):
http://www.mail-archive.com/dri-devel%
40lists.sourceforge.net/msg23412.html

Admittedly, it doesn't seem like anyone has tested on an X850 (r480)
yet, but it seems unlikely that that single card/chip in the family
would be all that different. And for the upcoming r5XX all bets are off
of course. But your comments are a bit off base I'm afraid.

/Per