There is some users including me requesting that nvidia make a hardware 3d accelerated driver for Haiku. Here is the address:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/game-ready-drivers/13/227786/span-classhighlighthaikuspan-driver/
Please all users of Haiku and a message to this forum requesting it too.
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This is a pretty bad idea imo.
Haiku developers have to define how the acceleration should work and how it will be integrated into the system and probably this will require plenty infrastructural changes in Haiku. There was talk about it but nothing finalized yet, AFAIK.
So if you expect nv to spend money and developer resource on a os where all of this missing / incomplete / not decided is just naîve, would be better to ask here before you contacting oems in the future.
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I was responding to what pulkomandy replied to a post I made. That it was up to users to request OEM’s for hardware drivers but I did have second thoughts about if the right support was available in Haiku. What needs to be done?
I hope if nVidia would start working on it, they would contact the Haiku team so we could set up a common plan for this. They probably know better about 3D acceleration and what’s needed for their hardware and drivers to work.
It does not prevent having other drivers developped separately, if their approach doesn’t adjust to other videocards. Or collaboratively, if their approach does.
So, yes, it’s unlikely that nVidia would put resources on this, and if they did, they would probably need to change a lot of things in the OS. Maybe they can just spend a few hours (days?) looking into it and telling us what we need to accomplish on the OS side before they can do their part.
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The BeInc engineer who wrote the R5 HW accelerated OpenGL and 2D driver is Jason R Sams, and after BeInc he went to work for nVidia and AFAIK he is still there. He hasn’t been vocal on the Haiku mailing lists, but it might be worthwhile to get in touch with him to see if there is any thoughts on Haiku at nVidia.
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I gave a link in my comment at nvdia, game ready drivers, Hiaku driver to contacting the Haiku project and also another link at my same comment there to the thread here.
There is about zero chance of this ever happening… Nvidia doesn’t even make open source drivers available for Linux, and a Proprietary graphics driver isn’t worth having. Make better choices when buying hardware buy Intel and AMD GPUs only as they do contribute massively to free open source drivers for thier hardware.
Also consider that to this point almost all AMD and ATI GPUs since the stone age (newer than Radeon ) are still supported in maintenance mode on Linux and occasionally even get performance patches for things as old as the Radeon 9800 Pro etc… there has also been talk as of late of forking Mesa3d into a current and Legacy branches so older GPUs continue working as they do now with fewer breakages and newer GPUs can benefit from less maintenance burden.
Frankly having a Proprietary driver available in this day and on Haiku would be the worst result possible as it would discourage any effort to port open drivers.
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Even older ATI drivers occasionally see some live too https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=R300-Performance-Fix-2019
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R300 is the driver for the 9800 Pro I was referring to.
Ah I thought that was newer, my mistake
Yes I know Intel and AMD make open source possible. Even though nvidia don’t, most people in linux have found the nvidia proprietary driver better for gaming. If there were good opensource AMD drivers, I would changeover fast to AMD as they price their video cards lower. Even though the open source driver is/was available for AMD, i remember a few years ago when using linux, having to use the proprietary driver because even that was better for gaming, then AMD cut off updating the driver for xorg, for cards 2 years old and older, so I had to change to nvidia.
That is the funniest most horrifying thing I’ve ready today. Nvidia’s performance on Linux is so bad, that AMD’s slower GPUs on paper often beat them, and 2D performance is much better also. AMD’s drivers have been VASTLY better on Linux than Nvidia for at least 3-4 GPU generations. The reason FGLRX stopped getting updates is everybody hated it… the open source driver has been better than it ever was for half a decade already.
I will grant you that on windows … the story is mostly reversed but that’s basically irrelevant to this discussion since Haiku will never get a propietary Nvidia driver.
That is not my experience and not most people who do gaming. Why do most people that do gaming or simulation on linux use nvidia and nvidia proprietary drivers? I am saying that is my experience from a few years ago, unless the situation is changing now. I know that still in linux with X-Plane at least, most users find the nvidia proprietary driver better but that might change soon when X-Plane uses Vulkan.
Because they haven’t actually compared how much better the experience is out of the box with AMD.
The situation started changing about 10 years ago… 5 years ago it was already getting solidly to the point where if you bought an AMD GPU that had been out for 6mo to a year it would work better than an Nvidia GPU, at this point after about 3mo or so AMD GPU get full out of the box support… and in general perform better than Nvidia’s GPUs of the same price range.
The fact that you even mentiont the old propritary AMD FGLRX driver means you are WWAAAAAY… out of date on your info. Today the proprietary driver on Linux for AMD even uses the same exact kernel driver… only the userspace part of the driver is different between the open and closed driver. At this point the Linux AMD driver is in many ways better than the Windows driver for instance once it was working most people on Linux did not experience all the issues that plagued the Radeon 5700 drivers for a few months.
Just because Nvidia hardware is fast on windows doesn’t mean it is the right tool for the job anywhere else and in 99% of cases it is the wrong tool.
Well ATM at least with X-Plane 11 and that is mostly what I use on linux, nvidia drivers are better. That is about the only 3d accelerated app I use on linux besides the occasional 2nd Life session. I did retry using an AMD video card a few years ago (cannot remember exactly). If was quite good hardware wise but the proprietary driver was terrible and the opensource worse. I must have tried that out about 2013-14 or there about. I immediately went back to nvidia GTX 680. X-Plane 11 developers still recommend nvidia over AMD but as I’ve said that might change with Vulkan.
Maybe AMD opensource would be easier and have more potential on Haiku than Linux with no Xorg.
The Nvidia recommendation is only valid on Windows… it’s dead wrong on Linux and Mac these days and has been for years.
Also a GTX 680 is pretty old at this point and on a very dated kepler architecture… a current high midrange card like the Radeon RX5700XT is at east 200% faster and has 4x the vram as well as many more advanced features.
“We absolutely do not support the fully open source drivers for AMD and NVIDIA.” they claim it will work on an piece of crap intel GPU on the open drivers, but then backpedal and claim it won’t work on the open drivers for AMD… what a bunch of liars. I bet the tried to run it on Nouveu… which is a reverse engineered driver for Nvidia… and it does run like absolute garbage.
You should also know that Xplane runs terribly on all modern video cards so you should not use it as a benchmark… it’s frankly embarassing how bad thier renderer runs on modern hardware so it is no supprise that they are porting to Vulkan… hopefully they learn to write a faster render instead of making terrible assumptions about what the hardware can and should be doing. It seems they are already going down the wrong road though from reading their blog as they say, an 8GB GPU works well but they that they need to texture swap on 4GB GPUs… except that is totally wrong, just about every modern game out there can texture swap fairly preformantly on low end GPUs and certainly you don’t need to keep all textures in vram in a flight sim!.. except of course their engine.
I realize that x-Plane just about needs a super computer to run well. When I said I changed my video card from AMD to a GTX 680. I think I now remember the AMD video card I swapped it from. It was a RX 470. I was running X-Plane 10. The FPS with same settings I had before were hardly any better than my previous card which was A AMD HD 7970. With the GTX 680 it went much better. I was using these GPU’s with a i7 4770k CPU, at about end of 2014 and beginning 2015 when X-Plane 10 was the latest version. Flight simulators tend to be very demanding on computer resources not just X-Plane. There is a user provided benchmarks from the built in benchmark feature of X-Plane that compares hardware:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15rNa7_naUM8a4YzzrzwrxvWSl4X8SHesshZGm7H54AI/pubhtml#
RX 470 … is a much slower card than a GTX 680 and has a newer architecture. The 680 is more what they old style rendering in xplane is designed to run on. So, the newer RX470 ends up gimped in multiple ways.
Just be aware that when something specific works well on a particular hardware combination that doesn’t mean everything will. And the same goes for me… I have to remember that sometimes there are software that just run badly on new hardware.
And frankly it isn’t that the flight sim is demanding… its just coded badly and seems demanding it completely ignores many optimisations that are blatantly obvious. They do ridiculous things like attempting ensuring exact rendering per frame when 99.99% correct rendering would be 10x faster. And avoiding lazy loading textures so they stutter instead… again ridiculous. Say your 680 could render it at 45FPS perfectly… wouldn’t 100+FPS with the occasional single frame texture pop in be better? Even on old consoles they do pretty advanced culling, and new consoles will be reloading textures faster than you can pan your camera.
If you check through your linked spreadsheet you can find several instances of Linux + AMD cards… and if you search for the same card on windows the proprietary driver on windows is running half as fast… this is due to thier propietary OpenGL driver being known to be lackluster, while the open driver has continued to drastically improve, even recently it is getting GL threading optimizations, that boost performance 10-40% depending on the situation and that’s on top of already outperforming the windows OpenGL driver!
I don’t really expect nvidia to make drivers for Haiku, they can’t even make ones for Linux that work… What I’d want is proper specs published, and not just a few tables, so people can write drivers for their own hardware.
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The RX 470 is quite fast from a hardware point of view. In most areas it is equivalent to GTX 680 but is better in memory performance. Here is a hardware comparison:
https://www.game-debate.com/gpu/index.php?gid=3598&gid2=576&compare=radeon-rx-470-4gb-vs-geforce-gtx-680