For those familiar with Linux development, the whole article could basically be summed up with: "Nouveau can now generate firmware for all GeForce GPUs on the market, including Fermi and Kepler SKUs". Yay! This is good progress, but not really earth-shattering; it would have been expected.
Its earth-shattering because its an entirely volunteer project, where once there was nothing but proprietary blobs for us to run. This is significant because 3D-acceleration has been an Achilles heel in the Linux desktop world for ages .. and now the community has sorted it. This is GREAT news!
It's not earth-shattering. This is nothing new; several older models have gone through the same process over the years. It has been happening for a long time. This article is just exaggerating the real news item: firmware can be supplied by nouveau for all available SKUs, including Kepler/Fermi chips.
nouveau is an awesome project, but this is not a huge thing. It's not going to make Linux gaming explode overnight. It's just normal iterative progress, which, don't get me wrong, is great and all, but it's not a big deal like this article suggests.
For some definition of "supports". The last two or three releases of Ubuntu have used the Nouveau driver by default for the LiveCD, which causes my system to hardlock (known, unresolved issue for almost two years now) so I've had to pass special kernel boot flags to disable it and use the VESA driver instead to install and then switch to the nVidia driver afterwards.
Realistically though, I don't think it's ever going to be practical to use the Nouveau driver. No Cg support, no CUDA support, and performance will always be a fraction of nVidia's driver.
That isn't to say that I don't wish them well, I do. But I still think it's foolhardy at best to ever expect this to be truly competitive with nVidia's proprietary drivers.
I have an Intel graphics chipset in my new laptop, and it makes a WORLD of difference being able to use open source drivers. They run on first boot, and even on live CDs. And no more funny pieces of software for configuring graphics-related stuff - all the DE/WM standard stuff can be used.
Agreed. This will go a long way to helping the first boot experience. Even if this driver is just capable of giving 90+% of users a slick compositing UI experience (without even worrying about gaming at this point), it will be extremely valuable.
What's the most compatible high-performance graphics card for Linux these days? Would that be something by Intel based on their recent effort to provide OSS drivers?
The "radeon" driver supports everything up to the "Northern islands" series very well. Check out http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature for details.
Support for the "Southern island" series should be coming soon. And AMD is working to make future driver releases coincide with the hw releases.
The free drivers are still a little slower than the proprietary drivers but they have more features such as KMS.
EDIT:
To answer your question directly, the Radeon HD 6970 or 6990 are the fastest northern islands cards and are well supported by the radeon xorg driver. I don't know if the driver can use both of the gpus in the 6990 though.
The southern island chips should be supported very soon though, which are the HD7750 - HD7970 .
radeon driver is OK on single head, but has broken power management on multi-head. Hot, noisy and power hungry. Ironically, faster card---bigger problems :-) [1].
Proprietary AMD driver used to have serious issues with gnome-shell, but sometime last year they finally got fixed.
I made the mistake of not confirming the vid card in my new work PC and it's a southern island chipset (Pitcairn). I use two 1920x1200 monitors and the open-source drivers can do that with no hardware acceleration. But if I use the proprietary drivers... I am limited to a total resolution of 1920x1920. That's not a typo, that's the limit it gives me - a square resolution I've never heard of in my life.
I am looking forward to the open-source support and it can't get here fast enough - running a compositing desktop puts the eight cores of the i7 at ~50% CPU :) (though I live mostly in terminals, so I don't feel it beyond a touch of UI sluggishness sometimes)
The proprietary drivers suck because AMD is focusing on the open source ones. Big changes are coming for the OS driver. They've been making vertical changes that don't break down into small releases well.
Currently that would be Intel if you want OS drivers. Along with supporting more of the OpenGL standard (i think in dev they're at 3.1 or 3.2 now from what i've heard, which beats most of the other drivers currently) they are also doing fairly well performance wise lately too from what i've seen benchmarked. They're really come a long way and kudos to them.
Does most compatible imply open-source? The proprietary Nvidia drivers tend to support recent high-end hardware, and they're pretty good in terms of compatibility; as in everything works. Including xrandr, these days.
Incidentally, I was shocked to find out that connecting three displays just worked on my current setup, not long ago this took hours of crazy old-school X server tweaking to maybe get it to work.
I think what was meant was that the AMD driver supports almost any ATI/AMD GPU and the Intel driver supports almost any Intel GPU. For Mali you can try the lima driver.
Last I knew nouveau couldn't change the clock speed on many GPUs leaving them either locked at a very low clock, performing poorly, or locked at max clock, chewing through power.
"Furthermore, the driver can't switch between the various graphics chip and memory speeds with many current cards and often causes the graphics hardware to run at the slowest operating speed..."
Please write something useful. Do you have a card that is supposed to be affected by this change? Are you running the right software/software version? Have you filed a bug report? Or do you just enjoying typing and negativity that much?
There has already been a bug filed on the bugzilla for nouveau. I'm not going to file another and spam their bug tracker. That's my positive contribution - making sure it's reported and verifying that the error the bug reporter sees is what I see. So stop being such an unhelpful, assuming asshole. You won't advance the cause of free software that way.
Yeah +1. With the ridiculously high amount of money you spend every year on those goddamn OSS devs, how DARE THEY not support every obscure chipset under the sun, HOW DARE THEY.
