At least with 11.4 on a 12-core AMD, the NOUVEAU driver is a crock for this. Not merely
does character reflection and many other things take ages, it dies horribly far too often.
NVIDIA’s driver seems better.
This is purely for information, as my problem is solved for now.
At least with 11.4 on a 12-core AMD, the NOUVEAU driver is a crock for this. Not merely
does character reflection and many other things take ages, it dies horribly far too often.
NVIDIA’s driver seems better.
This is purely for information, as my problem is solved for now.
So may I presume the nVIDIA propritary video driver is working for you while the default open source NOUVEAU driver did not? Keep in mind that nVIDIA is the one that decided to keep its code proprietary. It is a good thing they do post current coding, such as in your case. I also use nVIDIA GPU’s and their proprietary driver is often the only thing that works properly. None the less, this is not openSUSE’s fault. nVIDIA is the one that has made this choice to not release an open source driver.
Thank You,
Phoronix have a number of good articles comparing the nVidia proprietary driver with the open source nouveau driver, and also comparing the proprietary AMD driver with the open source radeon driver. While the open source drivers had made SIGNIFICANT progress in the past few years, in most cases (in benchmark testing) the proprietary graphic drivers are significantly superior.
And FURTHER to that point, if one compares the AMD and nVidia proprietary Linux drivers vs their MS-Windows proprietary counterparts, the Linux drivers are relatively slow and less stable in functionality (compared to the MS-Windows drivers), according to what I have also read in Phoronix.
It boils down to what jdmcdaniel3 noted, and that is the graphic card manufactures (AMD and nVidia) have elected not to provide the same level of support to Linux as they provide for MS-Windows operating systems.
Well, yes, but that wasn’t my point. I was merely pointing out FOR OTHER PEOPLE’S
INFORMATION that the problem is more serious than minor performance and feature issues.
I can’t be bothered to check how widespread it is, but it was pretty nasty with at least my
combination (which includes 11.4).
There are certainly links to proprietary software in the installation, but they don’t include this
one. That is a possible alternative approach.
A lot depends on how one uses Linux on their PC. I’ve been an almost exclusive Linux user at home since 1998. From about 1998 to 2007 or so, I was happy to only use the VESA video driver for my graphics. I did not play HD movies nor games (other than chess) on my Linux and the VESA driver was ‘up to the task’ for me. Hence for my requirements there were NO performance issues. Now today’s open source nouveau and open source radeon drivers have far superior performance over the basic VESA driver.
Around 2007 I started playing with videos (editing, encoding, playing back), and decided I needed superior performance, and I started using the proprietary drivers. Although having stated that, for what I do on a PC, the nouveau and radeon drivers are in the most part sufficient. I did have a PC (which died a few months back) that needed the proprietary nvidia driver in order to play HD videos using VDPAU and that requires the nVidia proprietary video driver.
So while your point about performance and feature issues is IMHO accurate and salient, it definitely does not impact everyone. Some users chose NEVER to install a proprietary driver, and indeed when it comes to updating the kernel or updating X there can be advantages for not using the proprietary graphic drivers produced by AMD and nVidia.
Sometime back, my having the same idea, and my thinking this was a good idea (having an installation desktop readme file with links to rpms that could install the proprietary driver (with optional links to a installation ‘the hardway’ explanation guide wiki)), I then at that time I proposed something like that in an openFate submission (as an openSUSE enhancement). I think it got something like 3 votes. Clearly almost no one else was interested in the idea. 
I have used suse and nvidia graphics cards for some time. Way back on 9.? nvidia drivers were offered during upgrades by YAST with great glee. In fact it strongly advised upgrading to them.
Personally I think this sort of thing should be encouraged even though the software may not be open source. It’s better than the alternative which is to wait for the os version to catch up which may even be never. I found that the installed driver option for my last card a gf 7600 couldn’t come near exploiting even the cards resolution. I’ve since moved to a 210 and from my posts on 11.4 it can be seen that things did not exactly go smoothly even with a yast upgrade.
Same thing applies to printers. I run a samsung colour laser for the simple reason that it comes with a linux driver that does offer all of it’s useful features. The annoying thing here is that I have to install it through the back door and bless them samsung offer a graphical install routine so I have to use the root desktop. Out of interest they have even updated the driver twice for me within a week because of installation difficulties on previous issues. I hope they still do offer linux printer drivers. I haven’t tried installing it on 11.4 yet.
I also note suse’s comment - can’t include none os drivers on the distro’s etc. I find that hard to believe as the manufacturers would benefit by users knowing which items will run on linux.
On this subject in general I here rumours that mac’s run a modified linux. I have no idea how far the mods have gone but maybe one day some enterprising person will do something that allows mac drivers to be used. In my view that would be marvellous. I could plug anything that’s available into my machine.
John
I think Macs with Mac OS X run a form of Unix (which is close to Linux), … more specifically using part of FreeBSD’s and NetBSD’s implementation of Unix with Apple using their own Xserver version.
hi The link fits in with what I heard some time ago on the software tom tom drums. They had basically taken a linux and modified it for their own ends. Doing that sort of thing with os software is far more frequent than many people realise. I believe my router uses a stripped down version of linux as do many other things. Basically it saves some one a lot of time/money. As I understand things they would not be able to do this with unix. It’s a registered trade mark. Just how that came about I’m not sure. Many years ago I had dealings with DEC and they were one of the companies sponsoring Bell Labs to work on unix. My interest was in using it for a mini with 5 user terminals stuck on it. They reckoned not only was it not really ready but also far too heavy.
Mac’s history is an interesting one. At the time PC’s came out their root with a flat memory architecture was far more logical but ibm chose memory mapping and msdos. This memory architecture may well have been similar to main frames but at the time was most definitely old hat. Why msdos - because it sort of supported cpm - about all that could recommend it really. In comparison with some it was junk especially in the multi tasking areas. Gates is a very very lucky man. As are Intel.
John