On Fri, 2007-04-20 at 15:48 +0000, Michael Fothergill wrote: > I installed Blender and had a little look at it. The documentation in > Blender says that you really need a good graphics card e.g. Nvidia GeForce > 7600 GS and that you need to install the proprietary driver for it to get > the full 3D acceleration..... > > How much better is the performance with the proprietary driver relative to > the free nv driver that comes with Debian Etch? There is a recipe in the > Debian docs telling you how to install the nonfree driver. 3D performance on the NV driver compared to the properly working nVidia binary blob is several orders of magnitudes better on the side of the Binary Blob. That is a choice, you have to make. > Would most people who have Nvidia cards and Etch on their machines and that > subscribe to this user list be using the proprietary driver? I have nVidia in all my desktop machines. I use nv on this particular machine as the nVidia binary driver no longer supports this frankenbox's GeForce2 card. I haven't had good luck with the nVidia-Legacy drivers. But that doesn't matter. If you are going to do serious 3D stuff, you really need a rather healthy machine with a rather recent 3D card. On my other machine, I have a recent card. I do use the nVidia blob. If I have to do some 3D modeling, I use it. The comparison is, nv vs. nVidia blob. watching old stop action movies vs. watching new movies with 100% rendered and smooth effects. Yes, that big a difference. I've tried googleearth in "soft" 3D support and in "hard" 3D support. soft == can't even move the globe for 2 hours and it take hours to zoom into my home. hard == plays like a globetrotter, zooms into my home, in seconds. > Are the companies making it difficult for the free software folks to produce > free drivers? Yes. Its the "competitive advantage" to keep the "drivers" closed. As they don't want to give away to much info... blahblahblah > If so is a big problem or can a sneaky workaround be figured out eventually > by some means or other? Not right now. In the future is possible. Look up the term "FreedomHEC". -- greg, greg@gregfolkert.net Novell's Directory Services is a competitive product to Microsoft's Active Directory in much the same way that the Saturn V is a competitive product to those dinky little model rockets that kids light off down at the playfield. -- Thane Walkup
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