"Not much has been heard in recent months about the open-source
graphics driver for NVIDIA GPUs, properly known as "xf86-video-nv"
but usually shortened to just "nv". Recently, however, NVIDIA man
Aaron Plattner released version 2.1.14. Although innovations are
few, some of the changes mean that the driver now handles a great
many later graphic chips that were previously only supported by the
Nouveau driver or the proprietary NVIDIA driver. These include
various GeForce 7950 cards, the GeForce models 285 and 295, and
many other graphics cards in the 9000 series.
"A week ago, in his blog AMD's John Bridgman announced some
progress with work on the open source driver code to give 3D
support to the R6xx and R7xx GPU series used with Radeon graphics
hardware in the 2000, 3000 and 4000 series. He said it seemed to be
behaving properly on 14 of 63 tests, drawing incorrectly on 24 and
either not drawing or crashing, on the remaining 25. Apart from
there still being some work to do to fix these bugs the driver
performance is also reported to be ("mind-bogglingly slow")."
