Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 1, 2007 17:30 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com) by nim-nim
Parent article: Free ATI drivers for Christmas? (Linux.com)

>Enterprise users will *not* play the closed driver dance like gamers. They have better things to spend money on

Um, no. "Enterprise users" will use whatever is necessary for their (often proprietary) apps to run as cheaply as possible for a given performance target.

For "enterprise desktop" users, onboard shared-memory graphics is good enough. How much power do you need for a web browser + email? It's for this reason that Intel is already the largest graphics chipset vendor, simply because it's already built into their core chipsets.

For "enterprise servers", there will be a discrete onboard graphics chip (RageXL is a favorite) to avoid the performance hit of shared-memory. It can be a dumb framebuffer, because graphical performance is completely irrelevant when there's nobody sitting at its console.

"enterprise users" who need 3D performance (eg CAD, Hollywood, etc) will pay lots and lots of $$$ for a fast, certified, hardware+driver combo which is highly proprietary. They're already running non-free software; why would they care about a non-free driver too?

Meanwhile, RageXL will be around as long as server motherboards have old-school PCI.

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