Coordinating work around newer upstream Nvidia drivers for users

[Jorge O. Castro]

On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 9:36 AM, Sebastien Bacher <seb128 at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the email. I read what you wrote but failed to understand the
> details of issue, could you give some details on what sort of issues you
> saw? Did we ship drivers buggy enough that you couldn't play with them?
> Was that fixes with the version you found in ppas?

>From a "Just Works for the Desktop", the drivers we ship in the
archive work just fine. However, with all that's going in upstream
OpenGL and (soon) Vulkan; coupled with AAA game releases; users are
wanting to get the absolute latest drivers.

For example, a new game comes out, and Liam runs some benchmarks:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/shadow-of-mordor-nvidia-benchmarks-on-linux.5769

If you check out the comments there are some times when a game
requires a new version for the best performance. This is just an
example, but it's usually a similar discussion any time a large
release is made.

> Having uptodate drivers in a documented location seems like a good idea,
> I would still like to understand how "unusable" our archive versions
> are, because if users can't use those to start games then I think that
> having an "out of the archive" solution isn't good enough.

I don't consider the drivers in the archive broken, I think for
desktop users they generally work fine. I don't think aggressively
updating those will be useful, since Nvidia has dropped support for
older hardware in the past, and I am wary of us sending out an SRU
with a new driver update and old hardware breaks. (This happened to
SteamOS in May).

It appears as though more and more games are requiring newer drivers
though. I was thinking of maybe pinging the guys over at Feral or
Aspyr (who port games to Linux) to see what they think.

-- 
Jorge Castro
Canonical Ltd.
http://juju.ubuntu.com/ - Automate your Cloud Infrastructure