Good news from the AROS world. Thanks to a bounty, they’ve been working on Gallium3D for a while, and the fruit of this work is starting to taste good. Part of this effort included a 3D driver for NVIDIA cards, and now a 2D driver, based on Nouveau, is being developed as well. This driver has reached beta status, and testers are needed.
The driver has been added to the nightly builds of AROS, and you can test it out by selecting “AROS (NVidia Nouveau graphics)” at the GRUB boot prompt. A tested nightly build is available [.zip].
“The driver supports all generation of nVidia GeForce cards (starting at the old GF1 series up to and including the GF9 series),” AmigaWorld reports, “The support for different output types (VGA, TV, DVI and LVDS) and automatic video modes recognition using DDC is available (supported modes up to 1920×1200 depending on video card and display configuration).”
Work on the driver is focussing on improving the driver’s performance and combining the 2D and 3D driver into one, so that complete NVIDIA support exists in one module.
Link goes to http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=5434 (edit: looks like it’s fixed now)
The announcement here on OS news made me wonder how they could have a 3D driver without having a 2D driver at all. But after reading the linked article, I get the impression they first had a 2D driver of their own, then bolted Nouveau’s 3D on to it, and are now in the process of replacing the 2D part of their driver with a port of Nouveau as well.
Anyway, it’s good to see that the efforts of the Nouveau team bear fruit even outside of the X.org environment. While I haven’t taken the plunge and installed their 3D driver yet (I just have no need for it), the 2D driver has been extremely satisfactory for me for well over a year now.
Edited 2010-05-21 08:23 UTC
to the AROS team. Always good to see alternative os’ move forward in the driver realm. Gallium3d is an awesome project, can’t wait till Haiku’s port is ready to test.
Do you know the status of Haikus port or any reference material about it?
http://www.freelists.org/post/haiku-development/Res-GSoC-Adding-3D-…
There are two efforts to port Gallium3D to Haiku.
One is through a linux compatibility layer:
http://www.freelists.org/post/haiku-development/Res-GSoC-Adding-3D-…
The work is owned by the employer and it’s not 100% sure that it will be released : http://www.freelists.org/post/haiku-development/Res-GSoC-Adding-3D-…
The other effort is to create a [more] native Haiku interface:
http://haikuware.com/20100513500/artur-wyszynski-interview-haiku-op…
… but I’d be happier if this had happened BEFORE I moved to an ATI-based system
Can you set the refresh rate preference in Aros yet?
Yes, you can set the refresh rate for VESA modes if your graphics card cooperates. I don’t know about other drivers though.
The nouveau driver allows you setting the refresh rate.
Here (http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=5438) is another important AROS news this week (even more important that the nouveau work).
For people not following the project, AROS development is accelerating since several months and the community is growing.