AMD maybe considuring releasing open source drivers themselves.

Posted Aug 10, 2006 14:33 UTC (Thu) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link]

Hell, if nothing else, they could at least release their _hardware
programming specifications_ and let the damn community make a good
driver.

BTW, NVIDIA, it's very offensive when your public relations people tell
your customers they're too stupid to make good graphics drivers. I have
news for you - you're telling this to the folks that made the fastest and
most portable operating system on Earth -- the one OS that can use _one_
driver regardless of any of the many, diverse CPU architectures are out
there. You guys in the proprietary driver industry can't even seem to
move to 64 bit without freaking out.

Posted Aug 10, 2006 22:09 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

The Nvidia binary driver, at it's core, IS the Windows driver. It's the same code as far as anybody can tell.

And their OpenGL stack is probably the same as used in Windows.

Everybody and their mom already supports 3d graphics in Linux because in high-end 3d visualization and animation workstations Linux is 'were it's at'. This is due to a veriaty of reasons, but just remember that when you watch a movie on the big screen and if it has fancy 3d graphics it was probably designed and rendered on Linux machines. The compositions of the scenes and edits on the images are probably done on Linux machines also.

Of course it's a complete propriatory system using propriatory programs and a lot of in-house code, but basicly it's all done using Linux systems.

The problem with the state of 3d graphics in Linux is that none of these companies support Linux properly. No open source 3d graphics.

And people are even willing to pay lots of money for them.

For instance you have the Wildcat line of workstation cards. In Linux the cards themselves cost several hundred dollars, but also the DRIVERS cost several hundred dollars. And they are not paticularly good drivers either.

.... HOWEVER ....

There is a lot of proccessing power in them-there graphics cards. I would expect that high end 3d graphics and scientific computing people would LOVE to get their hands on that and use it in ways that OpenGL doesn't allow.

If you get ATI to open source their drivers then this means that all of a sudden this makes their cards very very desirable.

One of the major reasons high-end people like Movies studios choose Linux over Windows or OS X for a lot of things is that they can do special stuff with the kernel and other useland stuff in isolation. They don't have to share the source code or go into negotiations with some propriatory company or anything like that.

So it would be the same for the drivers. These people would choose ATI not because they want the freedom for freedom sakes, but that they can use the freedom for their own benifit. (which is ultimately the point of all this)