On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 10:59:05PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
Not all ATI cards are linux friendly, the drivers they offer are also not open and no other manufacturer I can think of can offer such performance.
Anything thats Radeon 9200 or lower has very nice free drivers, but yes they are slow cards. The newer ATI stuff does suck more than Nvidia I agree on the driver front.
The reason I think is that there is either a. Some clever stuff going on in the driver that they don't want competitors to see or b. Some licensed technology that they are not allowed to release.
The problem is mainly the licensed technology in the drivers, there is also other bits that they try to keep close to their chests because of the clever stuff going on. Now of course if they released the bits of the driver that did clever stuff some clever hacker could of course make the drivers/hardware go even faster but they don't appear to have realised this yet. Of course this means that a few bits will get dropped from the driver *but* what would be great if they make the kernel module free software and let the community improve the driver and do the same with the OpenGL implementation. Then if you need the non-free bits of the driver that are patent and license encumbered then you could resort to a non-free library that Nvidia could distribute seperately.
In that situation I see that Nvidia get a big win over all the other cards as they get faster and better (and even supported!) drivers for free without breaking their contracts and NDAs with whoever else they have licensed tech from. The community gets better drivers and we can say how great Nvidia are and they can shift lots more cards to the growing Linux community.
Doubt I will see it happen though :(
Adam