Nvidia to publish Open GPU documentation. Has hell frozen over?

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DJYoshaBYD
I heard about this. It would be a fantastic step in the right direction. I didnt doubt it would happen after Steam finally hit Linux natively. haha. Im glad. Its good stuff. Hopefully Nvidia drivers can become used like we use the Intel drivers, but of course, with much better hardware. :D

These are some great Linux times we are in right now. Lots of very exciting things happening.
 
booman
I don't have a lot of hope, but if it happens then we can finally have decent open source drivers!
DJ shed some light on Wayland and finally moving away from "X" too.
See this is the attention Linux needs to be a faithful gaming desktop platform!
 
Daniel~
I'm missing something here, mainly why does Linux need open source Nvidia drivers?

The drivers I use now are downloaded for me by Mint ( more than a few other destros are doing this as well now) then installed effortlessly by mint 15 then they seem to run perfectly in any game I can get to run... true we are at the moment limited to DX 9 and below...but just a few months ago we were limited to DX 8...and this to will pass.

so why do we need open source drivers of Nvidia?

(Not that I'm against it!! ":O}
 
booman
because the open source community can develop the drivers instead of waiting on Nvidia. Once we have full access to Nvidia's driver code, then we can have more development, optimization, testing for all distro's much sooner than waiting on Proprietary drivers to be developed and tested.

Basically, Linux could have better drivers than Windows because communities will be developing them instead of one company.
 
Daniel~
Very good! So we would gain control... much like 3rd party Nvidia drivers in Windows...only much more so... I can dig it! ":O}
 
Gizmo
If nVidia handles it properly, it could be a win/win for everyone. nVidia's 'Special Sauce' has always been in their hardware. While it's true that driver optimizations can improve performance for specific use-cases, it's more true that performance comes from hardware improvements, unless the drivers are just pure shite. In any case, offloading driver development to the community (which is what nVidia would effectively be doing) would allow nVidia to allocate more resources to improving hardware, rather then developing drivers.
 
booman
Yeah, What Gizmo said...
This and Wayland are some great possibilities for the future of Linux gaming
 
ThunderRd
@Gizmo:
It reminds me vaguely of what happened some time ago with Nvidia's network drivers.

Nvidia's guys wrote proprietary network drivers for their own network chipset, and shipped them. Quickly it became clear that the drivers sucked, and somebody in the open source arena wrote *forcedeth*, which is actually a driver that is compiled directly into the linux kernel. In fact, I *think* it's actually maintained by members of the kernel team, even now. Nvidia didn't like that too much, and for a while advised users to disable forcedeth, and to use instead their own driver.

Over time, though, Nvidia saw the light; they actually began to give code to the forcedeth devs, ultimately EOL'ed nvnetwork, or whatever it was called, and began shipping forcedeth as the recommended NV network chipset driver.

If history repeats itself, this could be a very, very good thing. Frankly, I think this is the most important announcement in the Linux graphics/gaming world all year, even bigger than Steam for Linux, and teh Steam OS.
 
S
As Linus Said we shall see. They could be just saying a few things just to sound good but never really intend to give us much useful information. Like government leaders in this country do most of the time. Lol
 
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