Nvidia driver woes + Mesa

[Jon Trulson]

On Fri, 21 Jan 2005, Peter Bismuti wrote:
[...]
> We are actually having issues with our Nvidia drivers.  I don't know the full 
> details, I thought they were all proprietary, but apparently there are "open" 
> and "closed" Nvidia drivers, at leaset for X.org & XFree86?  (They won't let 
> XI graphics write one, that really chaps my hide. )
>

 	I'm no nvidia expert... As I understand it, there is the 'nv' 
driver which does 2D only and is supplied in source with Xorg.

 	Nvidia has their own proprietary driver, 'nvidia' with is faster 
and does OpenGL.

> Niether are working for us with Redhat 3.  Each has its own unique problem. 
> On my machine, I'm running XFree86 (40300? from xdpyinfo) and I can't get an 
> 8-bit pseudo-color visual to display from a remote application, while the guy 
> next to me can and the only difference seems to be that he is running an 
> older X server (40200?  sorry, don't have the details) and possibly a 
> slightly older Nvidia card.
>
> We concluded it was an issue with the Nvidia drivers, mainly because there 
> had been similar problems.  Are we likely to be correct?  Are there really 
> problems with Nvidia drivers?  I don't know if I'm running the "open" or 
> "closed".
>

 	I couldn't tell you.  Could be the driver, could be the server - 
or the combination of the two.  Check you xorg.conf and see if you are 
using the 'nv' or 'nvidia' variant and complain the the guilty party.

> There seems to be an Nvidia specific implementation of OpenGL and several 
> Nvidia extensions, but my gut says to stay away from them as applications 
> written using them may not port.  Is this correct?
>

         As I work for XiG, it would probably not be appropriate for me to 
comment harshly on this :)

         If the extension is specific to a vendor, then of course you will 
have to stick with that vendor for the future (or dump the extension you 
are depending on).

 	OpenGL is not vendor specific however, and a conformant 
implementation should work regardless of what vendor you are using.  Of 
course it's usually a little more complicated than that, but I would not 
avoid OpenGL just because of experiences with a single vendor's 
implementation.


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Jon Trulson    mailto:jon at radscan.com
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