NVIDIA Anti-Aliasing, Linux & Lenvik

by: admin - December 11th, 2009   Filed under: Linux, Reviews, Tech News Add Comment

Recently via email we were asked to run a comparison of the different anti-aliasing and image rendering options between the ATI/AMD and NVIDIA Linux drivers and hardware. Well, we have now run a few quantitative and qualitative tests at different anti-aliasing levels under Linux. For those that want to run the tests themselves with their own drivers and hardware, we also have provided instructions on how you can easily do so using the Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 “Lenvik” development build — it is irresistibly easy.

For this round of quick testing we were using an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 processor clocked at 3.86GHz and then on the graphics side was a GeForce 8600GTS 256MB graphics card. We were running Ubuntu Linux with the NVIDIA 195.22 display driver, which is currently in beta.

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Mac OS X 10.6.2 vs. Ubuntu 9.10 Benchmarks

by: admin - November 19th, 2009   Filed under: Apple, Linux, Reviews, Tech News Add Comment

Back in August upon the launch of Apple’s Snow Leopard we delivered benchmarks comparing Mac OS X 10.5 and Mac OS X 10.6 along with initial benchmarks of how Ubuntu 9.10 was running against Mac OS X 10.6. Since that time though Ubuntu 9.10 has been officially released with various changes since last August and Apple has issued two point releases for Snow Leopard, now putting it at version 10.6.2. As we await the release of FreeBSD 8.0 to deliver a larger operating system comparison, we have carried out a fresh round of tests comparing Mac OS X 10.6.2 and Ubuntu 9.10 (both x86 and x86_64 editions) under a variety of tests.

Similar to our August tests, we used a newer Apple Mac Mini for our Snow Leopard vs. Karmic Koala benchmarks. This Mac Mini is made up of an Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 clocked at 2.00GHz, NVIDIA MCP79 motherboard Chipset, 1GB of DDR3-1067MHz system memory, a 120GB Fujitsu MHZ2120B SATA HDD, and a NVIDIA GeForce 9400 512MB graphics processor. For some important version numbers when it comes to the software side, Mac OS X 10.6.2 is using the 10.2.0 kernel, X Server 1.4.2-apple45, OpenGL 2.1 NVIDIA-1.6.6, GCC 4.2.1, and a Journaled HFS+ file-system. Ubuntu 9.10 final has to offer the Linux 2.6.31-14-generic kernel, GNOME 2.28.1, X Server 1.6.4, OpenGL 3.2.0 NVIDIA 190.42, GCC 4.4.1, and an EXT4 file-system. The same package set is shared between the x86 and x86_64 editions, albeit a different CPU architecture. Like our other operating system comparisons, we are strictly looking at the “out of the box” performance for both Ubuntu and Mac OS X.

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Ubiquitous 3D: Nvidia’s RealityServer

by: admin - November 16th, 2009   Filed under: Games, Tech News Add Comment

RealityServer is Nvidia’s attempt to bring 3D to any computing platform that supports a browser or standard Web services calls, including netbooks and smartphones.

By moving the CPU-crushing rendering requirements of creating high-resolution images and animations off of the client and onto a back-end computer, Nvidia hopes to bring complex graphics applications like fluid dynamics, architectural design, real-time product styling and design, 3D video games, to computing platforms that don’t have the processing power to run them locally. RealityServer could mean the transformation of the Web and its applications into a 3D world complete with photorealistic ray-traced images and high-resolution animations that can be scrolled, rotated, and painted in real time.

To find out more about Nvidia’s plans to 3D-enable the Web, I interviewed key people from Nvidia and Mental Images, the company Nvidia recently acquired to provide the rendering software behind RealityServer. But first, we’ll take a look at the hardware and software technology underlying RealityServer and the tools Nvidia will provide to application developers. RealityServer will be available starting November 30, 2009.

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Enabling Compiz Fusion On An Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop (NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200)

by: admin - November 16th, 2009   Filed under: Linux, Tech News, Tutorials Add Comment

This tutorial shows how you can enable Compiz Fusion on an Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) desktop (the system must have a 3D-capable graphics card – I’m using an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 here). With Compiz Fusion you can use beautiful 3D effects like wobbly windows or a desktop cube on your desktop.

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NVIDIA Developer Talks Openly About Linux Support

by: admin - October 21st, 2009   Filed under: Linux, Tech News 1 Comment

In late August we started asking our readers for any questions they had for NVIDIA about Linux and this graphics company’s support of open-source operating systems. Twelve pages worth of questions were accumulated and we finally have the answers to a majority of them. NVIDIA’s Andy Ritger, who leads the user-space side of the NVIDIA UNIX Graphics Driver team for workstation, desktop, and notebook GPUs, answered these questions. With that said, there are some great, in-depth technical answers and not the usual marketing speak found in many interviews. While Linux is our focus, Andy’s team and his answers for the most part apply equally to NVIDIA drivers on Solaris and FreeBSD platforms too. There are many questions that range from the status of new features in their proprietary graphics driver to why it is unlikely there will be any official open-source support from NVIDIA to download percentages of their Linux driver.

Many thanks go out to Andy Ritger for taking the time to answer these questions as well as to NVIDIA’s Technical Marketing Manager, Sean Kilbride, for supporting this Q&A. On this page and the following pages are Andy’s answers, listed in no particular order.

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