Is the nvidia proprietary driver much faster (for me) than nv driver?

[Gilboa Davara]

On Fri, 2008-03-07 at 09:56 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Friday 07 March 2008, dexter wrote:
> >On Fri March 7 2008 12:36:04 Chris G wrote:
> >> I run fedora 8 and have a "XFX GeForce 7300GS, 256Mb DDR-2 display
> >> card".
> >>
> >> Will using the nvidia proprietary X driver be noticeably faster than
> >> the 'standard' nv driver?  I don't play any games on my computer but I
> >> do some graphical stuff, my main uses are:-
> >>
> >>     Web browsing using firefox
> >>     Lots of command line terminal windows
> >>     digikam photo album
> >>     VMWare running Windows XP as a guest system
> >>
> >> I think the most likely area to be affected by better graphics drivers
> >> is the VMWare (Workstation 6.0.2 if that's relevant).  Can anyone tell
> >> me if I'll gain anything by moving to the nvidia drivers?
> >>
> >>
> >> Chris Green
> >
> >The open drivers are an obfuscated POS.
> >ALL nVidia folks go here www.opentheblob.com and sign-up
> >
> >...dex
> 
> I did, but do you, in your wildest dreams, think that 8 thousand signatures on 
> an electronic petition they will never read are going to move the corporate 
> honcho's to please us?  If we are the squeaky wheel, they will just put out 
> more mousetraps cuz that is about the size of our squeak in comparison to 
> their total sales.

Alone, nope.
But combine a vocal community that signs electronic petitions that
may/may not be read with AMD/ATI releasing the complete (?) specs and
having solid 3D capable OSS drivers - and suddenly opentheblob's request
doesn't look so unreasonable.

On a side note, for those of you who don't really understand why an open
driver is required (Especially given nVidia's excellent binary driver) -
two sentences:
A. Users of Xen (Linux/OpenSolaris), FreeBSD (x86_64), NetBSD/OpenBSD
(*) and PowerPC (Under Linux and *BSD) are limited to the nv driver.
B. The binary driver can be used as long as nVidia is willing to
continue supporting/developing it. If nVidia kills this life-line,
nVidia users will be more-or-less forced to continue using F8/2.6.23
until their nVidia graphics card dies. (The first minor kernel/X.org
change will kill the driver - and there's nothing you, or the community
can do about it)

- Gilboa