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Interview with Andy Ritger and Christian Zander from nVidia
File Info: 11MB, 24Min
Ogg URL:
https://archive.org/download/bsdtalk055/bsdtalk054.ogg
Talking about the BSD family of free operating systems.
11 comments:
Is it me or were they incredibly nervous about talking about FreeBSD. To me this sounded like, yeah we sorta forgot about FreeBSD...but check out this linux!
This is by far the most interesting interview so far, thanks! :)
A great interview! Thanks for doing this for the community.
http://cisx1.uma.maine.edu/~wbackman/bsdtalk/bsdtalk054.ogg
When purchasing my laptop I did not pay any close attention to the graphics card, but now it matters a lot.
My IBM x23 has an Ati card on board, but drivers are missing support for decent speed rendering and twin screen / multi monitor mode, and the fn-f7 button to swith between modes, and to turn off back light in the screen, + changing beween external monitor requires a restart of the machine / X.
Looking at newer ibm/lenovo laptops they seem to be using intel graphics chips. Personally I only like laptops with a trackpoint pointing interface, so I'm limited.
the Nvidia fellas credited Matthew Dodd quite well, thanks for your work Matthew, do you have a suggestion on how we can go about getting better driver support for Ati and Intel as well? (in case you read this)
This shows how the BSD license is capable of tying in corporate vision and funding with the open source development track. It betrays neither but rather shows the kind of true freedom to work together.
It sounds like these guys, like many, went the Linux route first. Yet it also shows how FreeBSD is looking to better position itself, bringing on board more features and still offering better stability than many Linux distros.
I enjoy so many of these interviews and I note that the gurus that start and develop major projects, are not the same as those that rant for their favorite *nix and against others.
This remains one of the most fascinating and educational offerings on the internet.
I was glad to hear something more about this. I made the jump, reluctantly, last weekend to ubuntu until these issues are resolved w/ amd64. I've bought nvidia for years, especially because of the freebsd support...
I'll be jumping back immediately if/when it does get corrected to freebsd. More exposure to how the parties involved here actually feel will go a long way to remove the concerns the freebsd users have. Without freebsd support, I would be more inclined to give other vendors a try. I've bought 4 cards alone in the last year, so I am a non-typical consumer.
Does anyone know when ETA for the nVidia driver for AMD64 is?
Last think I heard was FreeBSD 7...I hope this has changed?
I just don't see the point of bothering with either nVidia or ATI these days, until they open up their programming specs so that *we* can write fully-functional drivers ourselves. We don't need for them to open-source their own drivers that *they* write. We just need programming specs for the chips. That's all.
Until they do publish their chips' programming specs without NDA (like they used to do), I have no intention of purchasing any video boards with their current chipsets on them. The Intel i810, and its derivatives, might not be 3D speed demons, but they work *today*, out of the box, in 3D acceleration mode, with stock Xorg and provide sufficient performance for me and my students (they run TuxType and TuxMath, two excellent edutainment games).
Functioning out of the box with Free Software is much more important to me than a few extra polygons getting processed per second. I expect Windows and Mac users not to care. But we BSD folks *should*. The majority of us, unlike them, know better.
Great interview!
We talked about this very subject at our LUG meeting tonight, most likely because of the interview :)
As a general rule, at the LUG, if anyone asks about video cards we always recommend nVidia. They're proprietary, but they have the most stable drivers for Linux/FreeBSD for modern cards. However, the point was brought up that a company could make great inroads in the market if they could come up with a reasonably performing 3d chipset (OpenGL at the speed of the ATI 9000 cards or nVidia 5xxx cards) that is fully documented and encourages open source developers to create drivers, even windows and mac drivers.
After the dismal talk about how difficult it was to get the binary drivers installed (doesn't ship with the OS, requires extra repositories, special downloads, etc), everyone seemed to really dig the idea of an open graphics card company. I think right now, ATI and nVidia aren't in the position to be that company.
I do however see companies like Matrox, S3, Via and Intel being in a great position to fill that gap. Maybe instead of focusing on asking ATI and nVidia to open up (they simply can't), we should be going after these smaller players and saying "Give us the specs, we'll make your card *the* card for OSS systems".
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