MJ Ray wrote:

Aren't the ATI drivers open? Then it's not just ATI's choice. You can help make it happen, please. You can contribute to their coding (practially or financially), help test or document them, support them by buying their supported hardware, etc.

Further to this, no the ATI drivers for the ATI Radeon 8500 (also the FireGL) are non-free and for the Radeon 9000 and 9700 there is no support afaict (either free or non-free) all of these being the fastest ATI cards at the moment. There are free drivers for the Radeon 8500 series but they do many things in software which means you will take performance hits very quickly. The only way to get a full fast implementation is to buy a commercial X server from Xig. http://www.xig.com

from the Radeon 8500 page:

http://mirror.ati.com/support/drivers/linux/linuxradeon8500x420143.html

<quote> 2. Restrictions. The software contains copyrighted and patented material, trade secrets and other proprietary material. In order to protect them, and except as permitted by applicable legislation, you may not: a) decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble or otherwise reduce the software to a human-perceivable form; b) modify, network, rent, lend, loan, distribute or create derivative works based upon the software in whole or in part; or c) electronically transmit the software from one computer to another or over a network or otherwise transfer the software except as permitted by this license. </quote>

One of the ironys of lots of the GFX card makers who now support free driver development is that they are also playing catchup with Nvidia who were the first company to get all of their mainstream cards working in Linux with full functionality. Lots of the other manufacturers dragged heels until they saw that Nvidia was supporting Linux too, the good side effect was that at least they opened their specs up. Hopefully one day Nvidia will do this too.

The other pertinent information is that of course there is much technology in the drivers which is why Nvidia do not want to open them to the world at large as they are afraid that ATI et al will steal their technology and incorporate it into rival products. This also would most likely explain why the Nvidia closed source drivers are much faster than any of the free drivers (proportionally based on hardware specs and windows performance as a reasonable baseline) as they can afford to employ people to do R&D for their products. As far as I am aware you will get a really high performance margin difference between your Ati card in Linux and the same card in windows at the moment due to the money spent on pushing out drivers that make your benchmarks look good in windows which of course are still closed to the free software community. What the free software community really needs in the way of support from the GFX manufacturing community would be the source of the windows drivers along with the specs of the hardware. Only then would you see the performance between windows and linux become more equivalent to each other. (of course this may even make the Linux drivers faster than Windows which would be really fantastic)

Then again, is the unreal code open anyway?

Nope, unfortuatly not. The Quake and Quake II engine source code is open though but the Quake III engine is currently not (afaik) but I am guessing this will change soon after when Doom III comes out but as ID Software still license the Quake III code out to third parties for games you can see why. (Why should i pay for the engine more than once? I paid for that already, they should only charge me for the game data now)

I need to spend more time looking at the status of projects using the Quake I and II engines but many people seem to add features to the game engines that add things to the old games and not use them to develop new games. Again a fantastic addition to the free software community would be an evolution of the Quake II engine and a complete game built around it at the same time (or to have some publicity for any free software projects already doing this).

Thanks Adam PS some of what I am saying here may be wrong/outdated etc. please correct me if so, I have done a reasonable amount of delving on the net but there is lots of conflicting information out there.