[MPlayer-users] Re: [expert] NVidia will be bannished

[Terry Mathews]

I don't agree with you at all here. I find the nVidia "closed source"
driver to be much more stable than the DRi driver for my ATi Rage Pro.
Also, the nVidia driver provides capabilities that DRI can't do right now.

nVidia is a good company that cares about the community, and I know in my
heart that should they decide to no longer pursue their development of
their own Linux driver, they will open-source what they had so that
interested parties can continue the development.

Oh yeah, if you're interested, I just bought a dual-head GF2MX for my
Linux box. Both displays apppear to X as one screen, so there is no CPU or
RAM overhead for Xinerama, or the :0.0 and :0.1 approach. Also, both
screens are OpenGL accelerated. I can set the computer up so that if I run
a full screen game, it switches to one monitor, then switches back to the
dual setup when I am done playing the game.

Don't crucify nVidia. They are the only company I know of that develops
their own Linux driver for their hardware. Everyone else outsources it or
relies on the community to develop for them. nVidia provides a
high-quality driver that works well and is updates in a regular fashion.
Some companies (**cough cough** Promise **cough cough**) provide a binary
only driver that is horrible and can't be used outside of the kernel it
was compiled for. nVidia had the forsight to allow us to compile the
linking code between the kernel and the binary driver, allowing us to use
their driver with newer kernels without waiting for an update from them.

Also, nVidia has every reason to keep their drivers closed-source. ATi's
biggest problem with drivers is that they have to develop different
drivers for every one of their graphics chipset families (Rage II, Rage
Pro, Rage 128, Radeon). Since ATi can't keep all of their drivers current,
they drop support for cards as they get older. nVidia doesn't have this
probelm because they've developed a method where all of their graphic
cards work more or less the same, as the driver is concerned. This
simplifies driver development and allows them to keep an up-to-date driver
database for all of their cards, back to the original TNT.

Bottom line: nVidia is a company. Companies make profit. Companies also
protect their IP. nVidia has an important IP to protect. At least they
care enough to provide a Linux driver for their hardware. Kudos to them as
it's a good driver. Why don't you go cruxify the many companies that don't
give a damn about Linux...?

The only nit I have to pick with nVidia is that they haven't provided a
LinuxPPC driver yet. I understand that's it's prolly not as easy as their
Intel driver, but now that Apple is only selling nVidia hardware, they
really need to buck up and give us a LinuxPPC driver.


Terry
 On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Alan
Wilter Sousa da Silva wrote:

>
> Hi People,
>
> 	It's just a commentary.
>
> 	I really regret the day when I buy my GeForce.  Since I only found
> out later, there's no open source drivers for such graphic-card (by now I
> don't know).  And since Nvidia seems not be interest about Linux since
> they don't give graphic-card parameters so Linux developers can make an
> appropriate driver, I really recommend to not buy Nvidia products if you
> intend to run Linux box at full power.
>         Such Nvidia proprietary solution can make the card rock but it's
> worse than using Winblows.
>
> 	Free Software and Open Source code is the *only* way for Linux.
>
>         Hail GNU!
>
> 	Now I agree with mplayer developer guys.  Nvidia is *REALLY BAD*.
>
> -----------------------
> Alan Wilter S. da Silva
> -----------------------
>  Laboratório de Física Biológica
>   Instituto de Biofísica Carlos Chagas Filho
>    Universidade do Brasil/UFRJ
>     Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
>
>
>