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Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see Linux get 1st class graphics driver support from vendors. I pay as much for my Radeon card as anyone else, but the fglrx drivers STILL don't support X composite.

But other then gaming I never boot into Windows these days anyway.

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Nvidia's Linux drivers are at feature parity with their Windows drivers. And perform at least as well...

Meaning they randomly lock up the system about once every three days?

In my case, yes. But the performance is good.

My Linux system with Nvidia graphics easily gets a month uptime; I only reboot every now and then for updates and changes to the system. Never had an issue with the drivers, even when using them for 3d gaming with Steam.

Now, don't get me started on AMD's awful attempt at graphics drivers.

I don't have any instability problems, with neither AMD or NVidia (I have a computer with each).

What kills those drivers is ongoing support. Since they aren't at the mainline kernel, they lose sync, and upgrading the kernels turns into a lottery where sometimes I have to uninstall the newest one, not a big deal, but anoying.

Are you running beta releases of drivers?

Anyway the reason NVidia has had strong Linux driver support for such a long time has nothing to do with desktop Linux and certainly not Linux gaming.

It's because Linux is huge in 3d and special effects (mainly movie, tv) and of course dominant in hpc.

However, Steambox is likely resulting in NVidia improving their Linux video drivers with focus on game performance.

No, I'm running Windows x64, so it's possible that Linux drivers don't have the same problem. I was being somewhat facetious, but the fact is that I can't run any nVidia driver after 314.22 on my system for more than a few days without occasional temporary freezes and some that require a cold restart. This isn't an isolated complaint. They have a bug, somewhere, that's been there for a few months now.

I see, I would point out that for production work you are very unlikely to be running the latest release of any video driver due to it being largely untested in the wild, no matter if you run Linux or Windows.

So the official SteamBox will come with very stable drivers for it's hardware configuration, and the same goes for third-party 'Steamboxes' aswell I'm sure.

For Steam users running on their own machine configurations it's another thing of course, but that's no different from the way PC gaming has always been.

One possible difference is that the official Steambox will likely function as a 'confirmed' hardware configuration so even if you 'build you own machine' or look to buy another offering you can use the hardware setup of of existing Steambox(es) as a hint of what to buy for the best 'Steam-experience'.

I wish I could do that. At the moment I still use wacom tablet and photoshop+gaming, so I spend most of the time in Win7 :/

I'd love to see them just publish docs so we can get good drivers instead. Bluescreens from video drivers are still a problem on windows, it is an even bigger problem on linux with fewer resources going into making the driver, and fewer people using them to serve as paying testers. Nvidia and ati/amd have both made it very clear that they either do not have the desire or they do not have the resources to make good drivers. So let the open source community do it for you.

I'd love to see them just publish docs

They have in the past, and got nothing but flak.

No, they haven't. They have released bits and pieces under NDA, but never actual complete docs. That's the problem. Maybe you should have listened a little closer to the "flak" to see if it was actually legitimate problems.

I wasn't nearly as involved in Linux news at the time, and it's too late to go back and change that now. Apologies for not knowing the complete details, and I'd appreciate it if you'd link me. Been having trouble finding the historical details.

ATI has released (almost) complete specifications at this point, NVIDIA has released nothing.

http://renderingpipeline.com/graphics-literature/low-level-g...

All you get is register dumps. Compare the ati and intel info on that site. Intel has released full docs. Ati has done as little as possible to be able to say "we released stuff" for publicity purposes.

Depending on who makes the hardware in the upcoming Steambox, we might finally get some decent drivers for 3D hardware acceleration. I would imagine Valve has the pull to entice AMD, nvidia, or maybe Intel to devote additional resources to it.

AMD had been releasing documentation for their Radeon GPUs, as well as supporting development of the open source radeon driver for linux (http://www.x.org/wiki/radeon/ and http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/). The open source driver just has nowhere near the resources devoted to it that the proprietary drivers have.

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