nVidia 96XX Drivers Lack Support

nVidia is poor support

Well let me just say that nVidia is pissing me off again, first they drop support for nforce1 and nforce2 chip sets just before Vista launches, then they sell people graphics cards for Vista that don’t even have non-beta drivers, then they go ahead and make the support of the “legacy” and take out support for even some more of their hardware. Then when they take out the support for the hardware then they stop making new drivers for different xorg servers and make you wait an ungodly time to get a new “legacy” driver.

ATI is just as good

With this new revelation from nVidia it makes the ATI FGLRX driver look like a godsend since at least a small part of it is open source. It’s starting to get to where nVidia is losing the battle against ATI on the Linux front, but then again Intel has all their graphics drivers open source and they are not competeing with the big two. Well intel doesn’t really care about the graphics market since most of thier stuff is built onto motherboards and isn’t expected to perform the same as a non-integrated solution.

ATI vs nVidia?

So when a person such as myself that knows about Linux and has used it for many years spends 3 days trying to get the nVidia “legacy” driver to work with any distribution of Linux is beyond terrible. I mean hell, if it works why the hell should I buy more crap I don’t really need. All I had in mind was getting the xorg server to work with AIGLX so I could install XBMC as a side project but when in software I hit a problem. I was however able to build the XBMC from source with very little effort but it did take a very long time.

So here I am just totally disappointed in nVidia and their support, I would love to see this so called “legacy” driver stuff just opened up and give to the community so they can make some use of this older stuff since the company that is a giant has no interest in supporting it for any longer. When a customer buys something the company that manufactures it should take some steps to maintain it’s inner workings even after they drop support for it. Just because a company doesn’t make, or has discontinued, a product that relies on software to continue to work does not mean that the customer is the winner.

I suppose that I can not totally blame nVidia but I will also have to place a little bit of the blame on the Fedora developers for pushing through packages like the newer xservers the day they are released.

Fedora uses the newest X servers

Oh, and then there’s more. So then I tried Fedora 10, 9, 8 all with the same problems of things just not working with this MX4000, I then tried Ubuntu 8.10, 8.04, 7.04 and that didn’t work either. So then I tried the 96.XX drivers on Windows thinking that would clear things up, but for some damned reason nVidia must have decided that they just didn’t want to provide drivers for their shit that works, hell I even tried the BETA drivers thinking that might clear things up and low and behold it didn’t do shit. So here I sit with a video card that just doesn’t want to work with any operating system at all.

I still had problems in Ubuntu as well

Oh, and then there is even more. So I put the older AGP X1300 Pro into the machine and for some ungodly reason it worked on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid with 0.00% problems getting 3D working. So it looks like ATI is going to be CRUSHING nVidia on the Linux market with the older X00 product lines although I can not comment on the HD series since I have not had the energy to get them to work on my HD4870. Just all in all I really will be thinking twice before I buy any nVidia product for any application whether it is for me or a friend, relative, customer, or any other thing I can think of. I used to think that nVidia was on their game but it looks like their game is to make hardware that will not be supported through it’s useful life cycle.

As an after-thought I decided to test this MX4000 on Windows with the 96XX drivers and all I get is some black screen filled with smiley faces, my ass nVidia, there is nothing to smile about here.