Re: [gentoo-user] Re: KDE 4.1...

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thursday 28 August 2008 23:30:54 James wrote:
> Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon <at> gmail.com> writes:
> > It's far from fixed here. Admittedly better than 173.*, but the vast
> > majority of work remains to be done:
>
> What ever happened to all of those folks that said Nvidia is the
> superior video vendor?

That used to be true, and nVidia historically did have the better performance 
and support. But two things have changed:

The newer GPUs (starting with 8xxx and 9xxx series) do not have 2D 
acceleration in hardware anymore, it's all done in the driver. Some Linux apps 
and especially KDE4 use X technologies in ways that nVidia's driver is not 
especially good at. Remember that the Linux driver is essentially a port of 
the logic in the Windows driver together with the guts of OpenGL ripped out of 
X and replaced with nVidia's stuff, this leads to a bit of an oops. nVidia is 
actively working on the problem with reasonably frequent beta driver releases, 
but it certainly appears to be way more deep rooted and trickier to handle 
than it might appear.

If they could just open source the drivers, then an entire army of coders 
would step in and help devise good code that runs well. But they don't, so 
nVidia is stuck with the 2 maybe 3 people they have on the Linux port.

And there's also the fiasco with the construction of apparently their entire 
line of recent GPUs. They don't react well to thermal stress and are failing 
in alarmingly large numbers

> I took quite a beating (on this list) for backing/promoting ATI,
> because I believe that AMD would do the right thing for the Linux
> community.

It appears you were more right than those others were wrong :-)

Thumbs up to AMD for taking the first steps and releasing some decent docs


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com