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Comment by thejosh | Hacker News Reader

After Steam announced steambox, and with the massive improvements since Steam for Linux, nVidia would want their drivers to be the best for Linux to sell Linux users on their video cards.

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> After Steam announced steambox, and with the massive improvements since Steam for Linux, nVidia would want their drivers to be the best for Linux to sell Linux users on their video cards.

For a long time, the Nvidia proprietary driver has been the best gpu driver for Linux, not that it has been super good but the competition has been really awful. Only in the recent years there has been any competition if you want a GPU with good 3d features. Intel has had decent 3d only in their latest few generations of integrated GPUs and ATI drivers have ranged from not working at all to barely usable.

That being said, this is a very welcome change and will hopefully make the nouveau drivers better in the long run. In particular, this is good news for the common linux graphics architecture (dri/drm, etc) and Wayland.

Yes

nVidia would be the way to go on professional application on Linux (think 3D Modelling and such)

Also stuff like this http://www.nvidia.co.uk/page/gelato.html

If you want opencl compute performance, though, Intel's haswell parts (especially crystalwell) are basically built for GPGPU, and can deliver huge strides above its price grade. A lot of professional contexts need that compute power, not necessarily opengl performance.

I remember, long ago when the Linux community was much smaller everyone wanted a killer feature so hardware vendors would do something like this. Never thought something like Steam could be such a killer feature.

Gaming is definitely a "killer app" of any platform. Heck, there are devices out there with platforms that only do that, and they are very successful. I'm talking about consoles, obviously.

Microsoft realized this a long time ago, and so did Apple (starting with iOS only). It took Google even more years after that to finally put 2 and 2 together, and realize that the reason why so many still choose iOS over Android is because of gaming.

Same goes for Facebook with Farmville, and so on. So yeah, if you want a very successful platform/OS, definitely focus on gaming as much as you can. It's what brings the "mainstream" in.

> Microsoft realized this a long time ago, and so did Apple (starting with iOS only)

This is a common misconception nowadays, but if you look at the early keynotes Jobs was more dismayed than thrilled by his baby being coopted by games. He resigned himself more than realized it.

It just happens that — on iOS anyway — gaming concerns and Apple concerns align in that both want a good equilibrium between CPU and GPU rather than a CPU-focused device.

Unix was supposedly created to make it easier to develop http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Travel_(video_game)

Apple realized that gaming devices could be a killer app. That's why they licensed the Pippin[1] to Bandai[2]. The fact that it didn't go anywhere was mainly due to them not understanding the market.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pippin [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Bandai_Pippin

Hardcore gamers will do ANYTHING for that extra 1 fps.

Linux exposes a lot of options that Windows and OS X will not.

Imagine if these particular gamers switch to linux. They can significantly improve the platform by trying everything they can for that extra performance.

The improvements could have far reaching consequences. Improvements that could possibly help people solving hard problems (HPC). It is not out of the realm of possibility.

gamers grabbing a few extra FPS by switching to linux is nothing new.

That's not the motivation. The motivation is the ease of transition that is finally coming to fruition. Linux used to have larger barriers in place for a layman.

I'm skeptical this is related to steamos/steambox. Nvidia's already working to ensure their proprietary drivers work as well on Linux as Windows and probably considers maintaining one codebase to be far less of a headache.

It's very cool that they're starting to drop docs to support the open drivers, but I suspect it's going to be a long road from these small steps to the open drivers being fully competitive with the closed ones...

Nvidia has been good when it comes to proprietary drivers on Linux, but they've never helped out with open source drivers. Then this happened on the same day as the SteamOS announcement. It's quite a massive coincidence if it is one. Nvidia's refusal to help out with open source drivers has been a controversial issue in the Linux community for at least a decade or so. I'd be very surprised if SteamOS played no role in this.

> they've never helped out with open source drivers

I think that's only true when it comes to 3D drivers. They wrote the 2D nv driver:

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/nv/

I do remember people complaining it was full of magic numbers to obfuscate what it was doing but it was indeed open source and written by nvidia.

The nv driver exists for the single purpose of getting into a working desktop, so one can install the proprietary driver.

It is not intended as decent 2D-only driver or anything like that.

I don't know think this is a fair assessment; wouldn't having users fall-back on the vesa driver be sufficient for what you are describing? The nv driver supports extensions like xv, so I've always found it was fine for my 2D needs.

That is the reasoning I've heard (read on the ML) from nvidia employees working on said driver.

Yes, I stand corrected on that.

"Nvidia's already working to ensure their proprietary drivers work as well on Linux as Windows and probably considers maintaining one codebase to be far less of a headache."

LOL!

Try getting Optimus working on laptop under Linux. I have a Nvidia video card in my Dell that's basically a paperweight, unless I run Windows.

It's a pain, but at least there's bumblebee. Still gobbles power though...

I wholeheartedly concur. The only piece of kit I had trouble with on a Thinkpad was the Nvidia card, and bumblebee helped a lot here. I haven't really put it to the test though.

I'm in the exact same situation with my Asus laptop.

I would be quite surprised if Steam{OS,Box} wouldn't strongly prefer proprietary nVidia drivers, considering the history of co-operation between Valve and nVidia on this front.

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