• Chromium on Portage [Gentoo]
    38 replies, posted
I see, I need a decent graphics card driver, I have an Open Source one at the moment which just isn't good enough.
[QUOTE=nos217;16975521]I see, I need a decent graphics card driver, I have an Open Source one at the moment which just isn't good enough.[/QUOTE] You should ask NVidia and ATI to release complete open source drivers along with documentation.
[QUOTE=The Pro;17009276]You should ask NVidia and ATI to release complete open source drivers along with documentation.[/QUOTE] Amd/Ati is actually working on it. Nvidia is not. AMD employs people to work on the open source radeon drivers, which are rapidly improving. Nvidia's open source nv driver is not being worked on at all. But there is the nouveau driver, and the guy working on that was hired by Red Hat. So yeah, the AMD drivers have a bunch of documentation released by AMD, and it's being implemented right now. The nouveua developers have no documentation from Nvidia, but they're getting stuff done; slowly.
I know, however: If ATI was actually doing it then they would release the source to the finished complete drivers, while what they are doing is better then nvidia it is not enough. Nouveau is not going to be done any time soon and i'd have to guess that nvidia is going to pull the DMCA bullshit on them. The NV driver is a massive joke, it's obfuscated, it has horrible performance and it's only 2D.
Here is a quote from John Bridgeman from Phoronix Forums talking about the open source driver vs the proprietary driver. He works at AMD: [quote] We discuss ideas with the proprietary driver team (not just fglrx) and pick up code snippets for programming specific hardware blocks. What we don't do is pick up million-line code blocks and try to fit them into a 20,000 line driver [/quote] [editline]06:56PM[/editline] More. [quote=bridgeman] [quote=user] Why is fglrx SO huge? Because it covers all the chipsets? Because it implements its own memory manager and half of X Server? Because it implements all of Mesa basically? I mean, the new open source 3D drivers are looking mean and lean, other than the spread among Mesa/DDX/KMS/GEM etc, I don't see where the discrepancy comes from. [/quote] I guess the main reasons are : - includes all of Mesa and a lot more (OpenGL 3.x, GPGPU etc..) - includes features the open drivers don't have yet (3D acceleration across multiple GPUs etc..) - includes specialized code paths for specific scenarios (eg different kinds of memory and bandwidth constraints, eg high levels of AA) - includes code paths for older versions of Xorg (remember our target users tend to run older distro releases) I don't think anyone does much in the way of app-specific code paths these days -- app optimiziation is more a case of finding out where each application spends time and making those operations go fast without slowing down other apps in the process. In general, though, the focus is making big complex apps go fast at the expense of simple small apps. [/quote]
So I should just keep updating and just hope fullscreen games will eventually work?
[QUOTE=nos217;17024766]So I should just keep updating and just hope fullscreen games will eventually work?[/QUOTE] Some games do work. One example is OpenArena. If you just run it normally, you'll get a ton of screen corruption, but if you use: LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 openarena, it will run fine, but after a while it might crash X. From what I've gathered direct rendering doesn't work 100% yet, but indirect does. And the reason why X crashes is because in indirect rendering if the driver crashes it takes X with it; direct rendering won't do that.
So there needs to be direct rendering support on the Open Source drivers. I hope they get to that haha.
I also compile my own Firefox.
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