Comments on: Another reason for free drivers

By: Robert

Robert — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:52:45 +0000

I am really impressed with the way this KMS stuff and all the other improvements have come along lately.

By: MacSlow

MacSlow — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:12:08 +0000

@ codebeard: Competitive gaming is a weak spot for this obviously. I’ve not thought of that. But on the other hand, if game-contests are held (where the price-money comes into play), they are done within controlled environments. So unpatched drivers would of course be used. At least at that point someone, who used to play with see-through-patches will land on his/her face.

I do not see a problem with the font-size of the comment box on my 144 DPI laptop-screen.

@ Jeff: Thanks for the correction!

@ daniels: Yeah, probably

@ Chris: The main issue here is a cheat/tweak/short-cut intel’s binary/windows driver performs to “look better” in a benchmark, which is commonly referred to by OEMs or end-users to evaluate a GPU’s performance to help them guide their purchase.

@ Che: Poulsbo is indeed a curse!

@ guru: Very true, but looking at intel (i965) it offers a solid and out-of-the-box solution being fully OpenSource. At the moment the only sore spots in their driver are some aspects in GLSL. One of the bugs I encountered and reported last week has been promptly addressed and fixed. I cannot say that about nvidia. The most hassle-free desktop-experience in my opinion is still provided by intel. Here I intentionally exclude raw performance from my consideration. This is - to a large portion - directly depending of the underlying hardware. Drivers can of course always be optimized, but not by orders of magnitude. Except they are in early alpha-stages

@ Jeroen: You are of course right, regarding the lack of integration-”fit and finish” for proprietary drivers. But at least ATI try to improve their OpenSource-efforts by providing full chip-documentation for Xorg-driver developers. This is to be commended and thus they are only second to intel in terms of OpenSource-friendly-ness. Let’s disregard the bloody Pulsbo-debacle intel created

By: Jeroen Hoek

Jeroen Hoek — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:29:21 +0000

The closed source NVidia drivers may perform well, they don’t integrate with the rest of the free desktop at all. Ubuntu makes it easy to install these drivers (which is a good thing as long as no decent alternatives exist), but you can’t use the graphical display configuration tool properly because the drivers lacks the extensions necessary. Also, LiveCD’s can’t use hardware acceleration because they can’t ship these proprietary drivers.

I never really noticed until I installed Ubuntu on a friend’s laptop (Intel graphics, FOSS driver compatible). It all worked out of the box and looked so professional from the moment the LiveCD finished booting. My next purchase won’t use ATI or NVidia graphical chipsets if they refuse to open up their drivers.

By: silner (silner) 's status on Tuesday, 13-Oct-09 11:04:56 UTC - Identi.ca

silner (silner) 's status on Tuesday, 13-Oct-09 11:04:56 UTC - Identi.ca — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:05:23 +0000

[...] http://macslow.net/?p=394 a few seconds ago from Gwibber [...]

By: guru

guru — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:58:36 +0000

your point is correct, but a bad graphic driver leads to a crappy desktop experience, and pushes people away from linux

By: Che Kristo

Che Kristo — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:18:28 +0000

On that front, I am very disappointed with Intel for their Poulsbo chipset (GMA 500) that does not use the open source driver , there is a plague of netbooks carrying these bastard chipsets thanks to Intel…

By: Chris Sherlock

Chris Sherlock — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:13:43 +0000

Am I missing something here? Does it really matter that Intel offloads some of the processing power to the CPU? If it makes the game work better, then it sounds like its doing its job!

By: daniels

daniels — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 02:45:57 +0000

Every proprietary driver cheats egregiously; it’s not just Intel. (And not just ATI/NVIDIA, either.)

By: Jeff Schroeder

Jeff Schroeder — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 01:08:00 +0000

Linus’s Law and the name was coined by Eric Raymond eons ago. This is not a Linus quote.
http://catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html

By: codebeard

codebeard — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:38:08 +0000

On the other hand, some people may think that protection from cheating is a good reason not to provide open source drivers. Open source video drivers can easily be hacked to facilitate cheating in online game with wallhacks and other similar things.

Of course, in reality the closed-source drivers don’t stop people from doing it anyhow, but I can’t argue that open sourcing drivers wouldn’t make things easier for cheaters.

PS: The font size in this comment box is so small that it is close to unreadable on a 96dpi display.