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Re:Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds by flabbergasted on Saturday June 16, 2012 @08:47PM (#4121915)
I think the real issue is that Nvidia is the most closed when it comes to releasing specs. With the proper specs, open source developers will produce better drivers than Nvidia.
Re:Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds by psykotic on Saturday June 16, 2012 @09:20PM (#4121964)
> 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.

Re:Aalto Talk with Linus Torvalds by thristian on Saturday June 16, 2012 @10:00PM (#4122007)
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.