[ 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.”