RedHat and nVidia

[LittlePenny]

I was reading an interview about RedHat 8.0, and I came across a question I thought some of you might find interesting.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1901&page=1

Why the nvidia 3D drivers are not included by default in the new Red Hat 8, which is a distribution release that is pitched against the desktop as well?

OWT: Well, aside from free software issues, Red Hat, in general, has a lot of trouble supporting binary-only kernel modules. Having code in the kernel that we haven't seen and have no control over invalidates all the testing we do.

HP: We don't include proprietary software with Red Hat Linux 8.0 in general, but in this specific case even more so because the drivers have (at least historically) had flaws that result in lots of bug reports and support headaches. If we ship the drivers, no matter what disclaimer you put on them, people will blame us for those bugs; and without the source code, we can't fix the bugs.

We also like to support and encourage the open source drivers for nvidia cards.

Remember that the primary target desktop users for Red Hat Linux 8.0 are users with a system administrator that will set things up, and can install the nvidia drivers on users' behalf, or purchase hardware that's better supported.

By the way, does anyone have any experience with 3d programming on Linux? I am curious myself on what IHV would be the best for development under Linux.

 

[MikeC]

NVIDIA links to our forum from their Linux drivers page, but I stay away from it

However, I noticed a recent thread on getting NVIDIA's drivers setup under Redhat 8.0 which might be of some interest. Andy Mecham from NVIDIA also frequents the forum.

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2563

 

[L233]

SuSE ship their Linux distribution without Nvidia's drivers, too.

 

[joozoo]

Nvidia have very good support for Linux, drivers are closed source but they work really good(same as Windows versions).
Never had any issues, drivers expose all OpenGL extensions as Windows drivers(OK, not WGL extensions).

 

[KimB]

At least with regards to consumer-level video cards, nVidia most certainly have the best Linux drivers for the time being.

On a personal note, without doing benchmarks, I had the distinct feeling that my GeForce DDR actually ran UT a little bit faster in Linux than it did in Windows.

 

[Dreadnought]

On a personal note, without doing benchmarks, I had the distinct feeling that my GeForce DDR actually ran UT a little bit faster in Linux than it did in Windows.

I can't speak for UT (It really doesn't ring my bell) but under Q3 I used to bench about 20-25fps higher under Linux (P4/GF4) than under Windows XP.

Having said that Q3 is rather unusual in that cross platform support was goal, not an afterthought. So many games are too buggy under linux for linux/windows benchmarks to be too meaningful.