Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 3rd Sep 2007 21:40 UTC, submitted by Michael Larabel
"On the Phoronix Forums we have been running a Q&A with the developers of the Nouveau project. For those out of the loop or new to Linux, the Nouveau project aims to provide an open-source 2D/3D graphics driver for NVIDIA hardware. After collecting a number of questions from our readers, KoalaBR and Marcheu have answered these questions. The questions range from whether there will be open-source SLI support to asking if NVIDIA has ever contacted the Nouveau developers."
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Member since:
2006-04-20
Well, yes you are right in the sense that the nVidia drivers work reasonably well, and are easily installed on most distros.
The thing is, the Nouveau team will always be several steps behind nVidia, simply because they are trying to reverse engineer something. This takes considerable time, and if the Nouveau team focus on cards that are old (eg, 2 years or more), by the time they have developed a fully functional driver for it, it will be well and truly ancient, and even people clinging to old hardware may have moved on.
If you are going to reverse engineer something, start with the 8800/8600 series, because by the time you have a fully functional driver for these cards, they will be starting to look a bit old.
So yes, it is worthwhile for users of older hardware to have these drivers, but the definition of older hardware will shift, and what is bleeding edge today will be older hardware by the time you get a decent driver written for it.
Unless of course nVidia or ATI/AMD open up their drivers, or Intel actually make graphics hardware worth using...