Nouveau - Jun 2007 - What is the motivation for choosing nVidia?

Dear developers

I have just noticed your fantastic work, and I am looking forward to
send you dumps of my GeForce 6150, when I get vacation in two weeks.
It is an integrated GPU on my Asus A8N-VM CSM, so I hope it will work.

The reason I post is, I am wondering what the motivation is for doing
nVidia and not ATi?

I have read the "FAQ:Why are you doing this?", but it doesn't
mention
anything about ATi.

Is nVidia easier to write drivers for, or do you think AMD will
release specs for their GPU's so it would be a waist for time, or are
you continuing on ATi, when the nVidia is done, or are ATi GPU's not
of interest?

Keep up the great work =)

Hugs,
Louise

On Saturday 16 June 2007 05:45:59 Louise Hoffman wrote:
> Dear developers
>
> I have just noticed your fantastic work, and I am looking forward to
> send you dumps of my GeForce 6150, when I get vacation in two weeks.
> It is an integrated GPU on my Asus A8N-VM CSM, so I hope it will work.
>
> The reason I post is, I am wondering what the motivation is for doing
> nVidia and not ATi?
>
> I have read the "FAQ:Why are you doing this?", but it doesn't
mention
> anything about ATi.
>
> Is nVidia easier to write drivers for, or do you think AMD will
> release specs for their GPU's so it would be a waist for time, or are
> you continuing on ATi, when the nVidia is done, or are ATi GPU's not
> of interest?
>
> Keep up the great work =)
wtf? sorry, I do really like nvidia graphics hardware, just like ati graphics 
hardware users keep using this hardware because they like their vendor "of 
choice* too.

i may be not understand you right, but what's so unclear about the
"why"?
nvidia does great work regarding their hw and linux/unix support, and yet, 
it's closed source, so ppl came together to break this gap by developing 
their own driver. I do certainly and heavily appreciate those guys and can't
even await in playing wine games like World of Warcraft, running beryl (or 
hopefully the new KDE4's kwin composite) with nouveau sometime soon.

Why are ppl buying green cars when we've already red ones near us? because 
it's taste.

Cheers,
Christian Parpart.
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On Sat, 16 Jun 2007 05:45:59 +0200
"Louise Hoffman" <louise.hoffman at gmail.com> wrote:
> The reason I post is, I am wondering what the motivation is for doing
> nVidia and not ATi?
> 
> I have read the "FAQ:Why are you doing this?", but it doesn't
mention
> anything about ATi.
> 
> Is nVidia easier to write drivers for, or do you think AMD will
> release specs for their GPU's so it would be a waist for time, or are
> you continuing on ATi, when the nVidia is done, or are ATi GPU's not
> of interest?
I have not written a single line into the driver, but I do watch the
progress. I have heard that nvidia hardware is nicer to work with than
ati. Nvidia cards actually tell you when you send illegal commands to
them, instead of just crashing. And probably other things, too, that
are different in the architecture. Like having hardware contexts for
running multiple applications on the GPU concurrently and preventing
them from messing with each other.

I do not really know what is the ati side of these things, but this is
the image I got. Some (most?) Nouveau core developers have worked on
radeon drivers in the past.

Of course, all the things I mentioned are nice, but I do not know
how much they affect people's motivation. And due to nvidia architecture
being more advanced in some respect, Nouveau is also pushing the
development of the DRM and DRI systems on part.

Will the Nouveau driver ever be "Done"? I think not, new cards come
out
all the time, and they have to be reverse-engineered. I do not believe
ati will be any different in this respect.

My personal motivation for helping Nouveau is that I happened to own an
nvidia card, and got pissed at the proprietary driver. I did consider
buying an ati card, but somehow never did that.

Besides, there should be more than one 3D accelerator card manufacturer
whose cards are supported by open drivers. ;-)
(So far Intel has made only integrated accelerators.)

-- 
Pekka "PQ" Paalanen
http://www.iki.fi/pq/

Am Samstag 16 Juni 2007 schrieb Louise Hoffman:
> The reason I post is, I am wondering what the motivation is for doing
> nVidia and not ATi?
There's another team doing avivo (driver for up-to-date ati cards) and work
on
r300 is continuing. It's good to have drivers for all common cards,
isn't it?

If people are new to Linux, they'll install it on the hardware they already 
have. They won't buy a new card just because there are better linux-drivers.
So to make everyone happy, it would be great to have at least some 3d-support 
for everyone. I hope due to the good work of both teams (avivo and nouveau), 
we can have that in some time.

-- 
Hanno B?ck		Blog:   http://www.hboeck.de/
GPG: 3DBD3B20		Jabber: jabber at hboeck.de
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