nVidia drivers

David Leppik

Mon Jun 23 13:35:21 -0700 2008

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Up until recently, the pragmatic (as in don't-care-about-licenses) thing to do on Linux was to always use nVidia cards if you wanted any kind of 3D graphics, and use the binary-only nVidia drivers. I never had any luck with ATI drivers.

Now the situation seems to have reversed. NVIDIA has had a number of serious bugs which have bitten me, even on a stock Dell Ubuntu system. I don't know if ATI or Intel are any better, since I haven't touched them in several years now. But at the very least, nVidia is more annoying (driver updates are from a different repository, and things break when a kernel update isn't paired with a driver update) and only nVidia can fix things.

I'm curious about the experiences of other users. How buggy are the other drivers these days?

nVidia drivers

Bruce Perens

Mon Jun 23 13:40:00 -0700 2008

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I use Debian, and have a motherboard with the Intel 965 graphics, feeding two 1280x1024 screens from the same plane. The Intel driver support in Debian works fine. Flightgear runs with the window pulled out to 2560x1024. The 965 hardware isn't up to the performance you can buy elsewhere. It actually works much better on Linux/X than it does on MS Windows.

Being pragmatic tends to get you screwed by stuff like you mention. It's not really pragmatic.

nVidia drivers

squiggleslash

Tue Jun 24 04:29:58 -0700 2008

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I use the ATI fglrx stuff under Ubuntu. I have to admit that within a week or two of getting my Thinkpad, I came to the conclusion that I'd have been better off getting the ATI-less version, which used the Intel GMA chipset, despite me playing one or two games whose performance would almost certainly have been much poorer under the Intel chipset.

The fglrx drivers are of variable reliability. ATI's updates come frequently but rarely fix much. Licensing issues, until recently, made integration of the drivers into mainstream GNU distributions much harder. In terms of support for X.org features, ATI is always a year or two behind other mainstream drivers. All of these issues stem from an unwillingless by ATI to integrate their code with the Xorg base, which stems from the obsession with buying unopenable code from third parties and then sticking to it rather than accepting reliance on proprietary code was a mistake in the first place.

In the end I think most major hardware manufacturers are finally realizing that proprietary drivers are a support hassle and a quality issue, but it's taking time to undo the damage.

it's *your* industry

Thomas Lord

Mon Jun 23 14:25:33 -0700 2008

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That the developers cower before corporate overlords, past, current, and potential, could come as a surprise only to someone with naive beliefs about labor market conditions faced by average working stiffs in the industry.

An interview question I've encountered repeatedly from "open source" firms is "We are thinking of mixing our proprietary code with open source using some techniques are lawyers tell us is ok. You got any problem with that?"

At one job, on day 2 or 3, I got called in to the HR office to hear: "Oh, by the way, we looked around on the net notice that you have some free software projects going. You aren't planning on continuing those while you work here [on completely unrelated matters] are you?"

Another good one I've seen, albeit not recently, is "You said something critical about my employer on the net. No way in hell we'll hire you - probably nobody else will, either."

I could go on.

-t