nVidia has made it known that the free nv Driver is no longer going to be supported. Starting with the newly publicised Fermi Graphics Cards, future cards from nVidia will no longer work with nv Drivers.

Originally, nv Drivers from nVidia were developed to provide basic 2D performance. 3D support was neither wanted nor planned in the open driver, users with 3D requirements have always been referred to proprietary drivers from nVidia.

In future, the nv driver will no longer be maintained and all users are referred to the proprietary drivers. The basic Linux Vesa Driver should be sufficient for a first installation under Linux, according to a nVidia statement, after which the users can continue by installing the proprietary driver. This works as the nv Driver hardly provides any more functions than the Vesa Driver.

This announcement does not mention the now quite advanced nouveau driver at all, which just a few weeks ago was taken into the kernel and will be standard in future distributions when using nVidia cards. This driver offers 2D as well as 3D functions so it was predictable that in the long term nv drivers would become obsolete.

From this point of view, the advertisement is hardly news, except maybe for the fact that the nouveau driver isn't mentioned! It would have been much more exciting if Nvidia had announced support or a cooperation with the nouveau developers... and it would have been nice to see a graphics driver follow-up of the forcedeth-story.

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