NVIDIA Developer Talks Openly About Linux Support

[ Thanks to Michael Larabel for this link. ]

"NVIDIA's Andy Ritger, who leads the user-space side of the NVIDIA UNIX Graphics Driver team for workstation, desktop, and notebook GPUs, answered these questions. With that said, there are some great, in-depth technical answers and not the usual marketing speak found in many interviews. While Linux is our focus, Andy's team and his answers for the most part apply equally to NVIDIA drivers on Solaris and FreeBSD platforms too. There are many questions that range from the status of new features in their proprietary graphics driver to why it is unlikely there will be any official open-source support from NVIDIA to download percentages of their Linux driver.

"Some of the particularly interesting answers include how the managerial view of Linux at NVIDIA has changed over the years, how greater than 90% of the driver's source code is shared between Windows and UNIX platforms, the actual percentage of the Linux driver downloads from the NVIDIA web-site, how an open-source strategy similar to that of AMD's may be technically possible at NVIDIA but is very unlikely, whether gaming on Linux will become viable for commercial game publishers, how the Nouveau developers are doing "a really incredible job so far", what's coming in the next twelve months to their Linux driver, motives behind creating VDPAU, and the biggest challenges with distributing a proprietary Linux driver. Among the "not yet here" features talked about include RandR 1.2, kernel mode-setting, ESA, GPU-accelerated PhysX support, revamping the NVIDIA Linux installer, and PerfKit/PerfHUD."

Complete Story

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