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by psykotic 5115 days ago
> With the proper specs, open source developers will produce better drivers than Nvidia.

That may be true for specific features like Optimus--I can't say. But if you're talking about writing a full 3D driver stack for a modern GPU, you're almost certainly underestimating the effort involved by several orders of magnitude. NVIDIA has hundreds of full-time software engineers working on the various parts of the GPU driver stack. Now imagine doing it without the immense institutional knowledge.

1 comments

Nobody disputes that nVidia's drivers (and hardware) excel at pushing textured triangles, but that particular measurement is fairly high up Maslow's Hierarchy of Video Driver Needs. As I understand it, people generally want nVidia drivers to be open source so they can add solid support for things like XRandR (instead of stupid TwinView), reliable suspend/resume, kernel mode-setting, that kind of stuff.