Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

> The power users (3D designers; movie makers; geologist; and zillions more)
> who actually need the very best have no choice but to use NVIDIA; there's
> no one else who comes close at the high end.

Eh?  I know fanbois get a little overheated on slashdot and gaming sites but we don't normally
see that sort of thing here on LWN.  AMD/ATI and NVidia have been leapfrogging each other for
about a decade now, stealing the performance crown back from their rival every couple of
months.  Were NVidia the undisputed king your statement would have merit, but in the real
world it is just silly.

On techical merit arguments for both ATI and NVidia can be made.  Intel and VIA aren't in the
same catagory.  But having a supported configuration is not just a political question, it is
also a very legitimate technical issue as well.  This time last year you had to give up
support for performance because both of the vendors of high performance hardware had closed
binary drivers, but that is changing.  NVidia is now the lone holdout and thus it is
legitimate to drop their products from consideration on the purely tech argument that having
an unsupportable system[1] is a negative, thus unless there are other compelling arguments,
such as a large price/performace difference (possible at any particular time in the back and
forth pricing and model introduction cycles) the open competitor should be favored.

[1] This should not even be debatable but.... common sense being so uncommon these days.
People buy RHEL/SUSE contracts because they value support to the tune of hyndreds or thousands
of dollars, something that becomes of dubious value if an NVidia card in installed.  Unless
the NVidia solution's value add vs ATI/AMD exceeds the loss in value of the support contract,
basic economics says ditch NVidia.