The Haus

Tuesday, March 21, 2000

NVIDIA and Linux -- 11:42 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

NVIDIA's driver support in Linux has always been somewhat, ahem, sketchy. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be getting any better. According to this article on Slashdot, the new binary-only drivers that should be coming sometime this century from NVIDIA will not be using DRI (Direct Rendering Infrastructure--XFree86's answer to DirectX) at all. It's bad enough not make closed-source drivers in Linux (which is the unforgivable sin in the Linux world), but they are also throwing away the DRI standard which their own Linux FAQ said they would be supporting.

I guess it will all come down to this: if the NVIDIA binary driver proves to be by leaps and bounds better than any DRI driver, then people will use it. But if it is closed-source and it sucks, no one will come within 500 miles of it. I hope NVIDIA rethinks this position. Of course, since the vast majority of gamers use Win32 and they just got the big X-Box contract, they may not give a rats. J.t.? Any thoughts?

Update! In reading through the comments on that article, I came across this one which may give some insight into the situation:
NVidia is going to take a lot of heat from the Open Source community over this. But the reason why its closed source is because they're stuck between a rock and a hard place.

The AGP DMA technology their cards use is licensed from this other company (forgot their name). They signed an NDA to get this technology.
Interesting point, if it is correct. Rarely are these matters as simple as they may appear.

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