[MPlayer-users] Re: [expert] NVidia will be bannished

[Nick Kurshev]

Hello, Terry!

On Mon, 28 Jan 2002 12:26:39 -0500 (EST) you wrote:

> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> I don't agree with you at all here. I find the nVidia "closed source"
> driver to be much more stable than the DRi driver for my ATi Rage Pro.
> Also, the nVidia driver provides capabilities that DRI can't do right now.
> 
I don't know about DRI and RagePro if you meant 3DRage then you'll not find
any support for this chip since there no volunteers who wants support that.
OTOH - other ATI's chip have more or less good support from DRI.
> nVidia is a good company that cares about the community, and I know in my
> heart that should they decide to no longer pursue their development of
> their own Linux driver, they will open-source what they had so that
> interested parties can continue the development.
> 
[snip]
> 
> Don't crucify nVidia. They are the only company I know of that develops
> their own Linux driver for their hardware. Everyone else outsources it or
> relies on the community to develop for them. nVidia provides a
> high-quality driver that works well and is updates in a regular fashion.
> Some companies (**cough cough** Promise **cough cough**) provide a binary
> only driver that is horrible and can't be used outside of the kernel it
> was compiled for. nVidia had the forsight to allow us to compile the
> linking code between the kernel and the binary driver, allowing us to use
> their driver with newer kernels without waiting for an update from them.
Please look at mplayer-CVS:main/drivers/radeon - who waits for updates?

> 
> Also, nVidia has every reason to keep their drivers closed-source. ATi's
> biggest problem with drivers is that they have to develop different
> drivers for every one of their graphics chipset families (Rage II, Rage
> Pro, Rage 128, Radeon). Since ATi can't keep all of their drivers current,
> they drop support for cards as they get older. nVidia doesn't have this
No - ATI don't want develop opensource drivers and donates some opensource developers
with documentation instead. Indeed you are wrong since Rage128 driver will work with radeon
and vice versa - indeed there is only one barrier: mach64 - rage128.
But sorry - every company sometime perform full revision of internal structure
of their products. (same as 286 and 386 intel's cpus).
[snip]
> 
> The only nit I have to pick with nVidia is that they haven't provided a
> LinuxPPC driver yet. I understand that's it's prolly not as easy as their
> Intel driver, but now that Apple is only selling nVidia hardware, they
> really need to buck up and give us a LinuxPPC driver.
> 
PPC always was closed platform and as result its place on the market is less
of 15% agains of open, expandable IBM's platform. (Even if PPC is faster of Intel's cpus)
> 
> Terry
>  On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Alan
> Wilter Sousa da Silva wrote:
> 
[snip]
> 
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Best regards! Nick