Nvidia - Open-source Software Support

Open-source Software Support

Nvidia does not publish the documentation for its hardware, meaning that programmers cannot write appropriate and effective open-source drivers for Nvidia's products (compare Graphics hardware and FOSS). Instead, Nvidia provides its own binary GeForce graphics drivers for X.Org and a thin open-source library that interfaces with the Linux, FreeBSD or Solaris kernels and the proprietary graphics software. Nvidia also provided but stopped supporting an obfuscated open-source driver that only supports two-dimensional hardware acceleration and ships with the X.Org distribution.

The proprietary nature of Nvidia's drivers has generated dissatisfaction within free-software communities. Linus Torvalds has publicly stated that Nvidia "has been the worst troublespot we've had with hardware manufacturers". Some Linux and BSD users insist on using only open-source drivers, and regard Nvidia's insistence on providing nothing more than a binary-only driver as wholly inadequate, given that competing manufacturers (like Intel) offer support and documentation for open-source developers, and that others (like ATI) release partial documentation and provide some active development.

Because of the closed nature of the drivers, Nvidia video cards cannot deliver adequate features on some platforms and architectures given that Nvidia only provides x86/x64 driver builds. As a result, support for three-dimensional graphics acceleration in Linux on the PowerPC does not exist, nor does support for Linux on the hypervisor-restricted PlayStation 3 console.