OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/18177/Nouveau_Where_It_Stands_Today Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:46:27 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com And this is a good thing http://osnews.com/thread?252011 http://osnews.com/thread?252011 As I remember, when this project started, i had a strange feeling about it's sucess. But as i saw later work, Noveau looks very promising. Now we need similar project with AMD.Browser: Opera/9.50 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/4.0.8462/20; U; en) Sat, 30 Jun 2007 18:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Dr-ROX) Comments Hate phoronix http://osnews.com/thread?252029 http://osnews.com/thread?252029 @Dr-ROX is this an advertisement
"Browser: Opera/9.50 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/4.0.8462/20; U; en)"

I hate the phoronix articles. I actually cringe whenever I'm see one...and their benchmarking is quite frankly appalling. Whats worse is that when you get articles concerning *cutting edge* drivers, they are always out of date, and contain little to *NO* information.

The only thing I gleaned from the article is that Fedora looks very pretty


Roguelike:Vanilla Angband (3.0.8 prerelease 1;Mage;Level 27)Edited 2007-06-30 20:28 Sat, 30 Jun 2007 20:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (cyclops) Comments RE: And this is a good thing http://osnews.com/thread?252037 http://osnews.com/thread?252037 Yeah, the radeon rivers need to be rethought and reimplemented. Much of the code in the radeon drivers are based off of what ati had given the oss community a long time ago. I think starting from scratch and doing clean room drivers would be the better solution. This article doesn't speak on performance though. Sat, 30 Jun 2007 21:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (apoclypse) Comments RE: Hate phoronix http://osnews.com/thread?252043 http://osnews.com/thread?252043 @Dr-ROX is this an advertisement

OSNews automatically posts mobile user agents. Next time, please contact the OSNews-crew for these matters, don't use the forums. Sat, 30 Jun 2007 22:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom_Holwerda) Comments RE[2]: And this is a good thing http://osnews.com/thread?252045 http://osnews.com/thread?252045 Are you kidding? You're really comparing a real-world working driver which supports pretty much every application on a large gamut of video cards released since a least 2000 with a new incomplete driver which has problem even switching resolution in a fairly common card and can't really do more than display glxgears?

Why should one throw out years of development for a "clean room" work which couldn't possibly give comparable results in years? The nouveau project is a good thing and deserves attention but, please, keep your feet on the ground and don't buy all the hype. Sat, 30 Jun 2007 22:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (GhePeU) Comments RE[3]: And this is a good thing http://osnews.com/thread?252046 http://osnews.com/thread?252046 I wasn't buying the hype. My impression of the ati drivers (which I use) is that they generally suck, the performance is awful and there are features missing. On top of that stability is a factor. When I mean throw out I don't mean get rid of the drivers, i mean start working on better drivers and deprecate the radeon drivers when and if the other ones work better. Maybe doing a clean room driver may have better results. This is just my opinion though so who knows, we'll see when they let us know how these perform, if they perform as crappy as the radeon drivers, then they shouldn't bother. Sat, 30 Jun 2007 23:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (apoclypse) Comments RE[2]: Hate phoronix http://osnews.com/thread?252049 http://osnews.com/thread?252049 osnews should have an option to post useragents in the preferences, so i can do it too ;) Sat, 30 Jun 2007 23:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (spikeb) Comments RE[3]: And this is a good thing http://osnews.com/thread?252064 http://osnews.com/thread?252064 Part of the problem with the "maturity" of the PC software industry is that it's extremely expensive for a vendor to start over with a clean slate and the benefit of hindsight. The driver architects at the big graphics vendors realize that they could design a better performing and much more reliable driver by starting over, but they also know that improving the existing driver is more cost-effective. The graphics vendors don't have to option of dropping their existing drivers to work on new ones, but the free software community does.

It won't take "years" for the Nouveau project to provide "good enough" 3D performance for the majority of *nix users. In 18 months, Nouveau will certainly be the default NVIDIA driver in Ubuntu and Fedora, and most users won't have a compelling reason to switch to the binary blob. It needs to handle Compiz with ease and some previous-generation games via Cedega. Give them 18 months, possibly even less. Sun, 01 Jul 2007 04:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (butters) Comments RE: And this is a good thing http://osnews.com/thread?252072 http://osnews.com/thread?252072 Actually, there *is* a project similar to this for AMD / ATI graphics cards. It is called avivo and it is located here:
http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=avivo/xf86-video-avivo.git;a=summa...

They are currently trying to get acceleration for the r500 based cards working like they do with the r300 based cards. Long live open source!

Edit:
Adding link talking about this driver a bit. Not everyone wants to just read through code:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=753&num=... Edited 2007-07-01 05:48 Sun, 01 Jul 2007 05:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (SEJeff) Comments RE: Hate phoronix http://osnews.com/thread?252076 http://osnews.com/thread?252076 I have to agree about Phoronix. Many of their articles are like this and really devoid of useful content, or filled with useless and meaningless benchmarks. Sun, 01 Jul 2007 06:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (bsharitt) Comments RE[2]: Hate phoronix http://osnews.com/thread?252113 http://osnews.com/thread?252113 @Thom_Holwerda "OSNews automatically posts mobile user agents. Next time, please contact the OSNews-crew for these matters, don't use the forums."

Then it shouldn't. My question was both civil and accurate, How would I know OS-News promotes Opera. I thought it was a choice of the individual. I didn't take points off him so what are you on about? Sun, 01 Jul 2007 15:14:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (cyclops) Comments RE[2]: Hate phoronix http://osnews.com/thread?252115 http://osnews.com/thread?252115 Same here. I especially like how they manage to make useless graphic card benchmarks each time Nvivia or ATI release a new driver update, testing only programs nobody uses, and showing a variation from 64,34 FPS to 64,35 FPS ;) Sun, 01 Jul 2007 15:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (miles) Comments information is good http://osnews.com/thread?252170 http://osnews.com/thread?252170
Now we need similar project with AMD.


What? Dude, we have had a project for ATI/AMD open source video drivers long before Nouveau started. R300 series are working, R400 and R500 are under active development, and work on R600 has started. I think R600 is at about the same functionality as the Nouveau driver, but I'm not too sure (don't own an ATI card personally).

i mean start working on better drivers and deprecate the radeon drivers when and if the other ones work better. Maybe doing a clean room driver may have better results.


What exactly is that supposed to accomplish? Is there any evidence that the shortcomings of the current ATI/AMD drivers cannot be fixed without rewriting them? Starting from scratch "just because" is one of those things that inexperienced/incompetent software developers like to do all too often. Chances are, any shortcomings of the current driver would persist into an all new driver, because both drivers would suffer from the same lack of documentation and vendor support. Sun, 01 Jul 2007 18:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (elanthis) Comments RE: information is good http://osnews.com/thread?252176 http://osnews.com/thread?252176 Actually, many of the developers working on the radeon drivers say that there are some fundamental design flaws they would like to get rid of. Whether a complete rewrite from scratch is needed, I don't know, but they do at least need a major overhaul. Sometimes it is easier to just start from scratch and use the old code as a reference, and other times that would just be stupid. Sun, 01 Jul 2007 19:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (smitty) Comments RE[2]: information is good http://osnews.com/thread?252377 http://osnews.com/thread?252377 Yes, I read something like that. The r300 driver team also picked up a trick or two from noveau's reverse engineering tools that hopefully will be put to good use soon. Nevertheless, the r300 driver with a Radeon 9800 Pro already gives 10x the frames per second the noveau driver with a GF 6600 shows in the screenshot running glxgears. That's not a very good benchmark, though.

Still, I feel the open ATI drivers are in very good hands. Mon, 02 Jul 2007 21:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (No it isnt) Comments