[ Thanks to Michael Larabel for
this link. ]
“As we shared a few days ago, Fedora 13 will provide
OpenGL acceleration support for NVIDIA graphics cards via the
Nouveau driver when installing the Mesa DRI experimental drivers
package. There is finally 3D acceleration for NVIDIA graphics cards
using an open-source driver on Linux without having to depend upon
NVIDIA’s official binary driver. What makes this open-source 3D
support for NVIDIA GPUs even more interesting is that it is atop
the Gallium3D driver architecture rather than classic Mesa. With
that said, we are providing early benchmarks of the Nouveau
Gallium3D driver in Fedora 13 with two GeForce graphics cards as we
compare the performance to NVIDIA’s official Linux driver.“For a few releases Red Hat has been shipping the Nouveau driver
in Fedora rather than using the obfuscated xf86-video-nv driver
that goes without any 3D support and is crippled with other
limitations. Fedora started having the xf86-video-nouveau DDX
driver with user-space mode-setting, but that changed over to the
kernel mode-setting code-paths where it continues to be the default
NVIDIA option with Fedora 12. Fedora 13 will again feature all of
the latest bleeding-edge bits for Nouveau and the other parts of
the X.Org stack, but with this forthcoming release the Nouveau 3D
driver is packaged in the mesa-dri-drivers-experimental RPM
package. Simply installing this package via yum will enable the
NVIDIA 3D support.“For years the Nouveau project has been seeking to provide a
full open-source driver stack for all current and past NVIDIA
graphics processors and finally all of this hard work is coming to
fruition. While Fedora was the first to begin shipping Nouveau,
other distributions are doing the same and the Nouveau DDX driver
has been available in Ubuntu since 9.04 and with Ubuntu 10.04 they
too will be ditching xf86-video-nv by default and turning to
Nouveau with KMS.”