I hate Linux Graphics (Linux Hater's Blog)

Hmmm...

I can't agree about 10 years obsolete. 1998 was a long time ago. Back then it was still
considered completely reasonable for your 3D graphics solution to be a loopback overlay hack,
separate PCI card and everything. Certainly the "full circle" trick of executing OpenGL code
in a window, rendering that window onto the desktop, and then rendering the desktop as a GL
texture onto a moving surface couldn't be done, the hardware just didn't support that (not
talking about what SGI could do, although I don't remember ever seeing this trick done with
1998 era IRIX, but what PC hardware XFree86 was built for could do)

Part of the purpose of DRI is actually to /avoid/ "all these low-level separate drivers".
There's only one piece of code for managing the Radeon's microcode, one piece of code for
controlling its DMA transfers etc. The X server, and the GL application are sharing the
hardware through the DRI code, just as my web browser and my compiler are sharing the hard
disk through the VFS code. Whether the line was drawn in exactly the right places is up for
question. Evidently Microsoft didn't think they'd done a good job of drawing this line prior
to Vista either...

There's nothing you can do about the fact that "vertical sync" is useless outside of some
simple scenarios. In a video production environment you can decide, de facto that you are only
going to handle those scenarios and anything exceptional will be handled "out of house" by a
specialist agency. Home users can't send off the AVI they downloaded from Something Awful to
an agency to have it converted to their LCD panel's native frequency.

If you're content to do fullscreen playback to a single output, which is the same sort of
simple scenario I talked about, then yes, you can have vertical sync, but I won't guarantee
that the interaction between the output's native frequency and the video you're playing will
be acceptable, some people are more sensitive to the resulting "uneven" playback than others.

I can't say that I do just install the nVidia drivers BTW, they likely wouldn't work on this
Z60m anyway since it has no nVidia hardware, and my experience has been that I can actually
investigate and sometimes fix bugs in the Free drivers, whether that be the Radeon driver from
airlied and co or the Nouveau driver on my other machine.

There has historically been too much NIH syndrome around graphics. But not just on Linux. It's
everywhere. While people seem only too happy to re-use someone else's XML parsing code, or
even scanner drivers, something about graphics makes people want to design everything from
scratch and then, when they learn a few of the things X coders learned twenty years ago, they
design it again, and again, and we have probably twice as many people working on Free Software
graphics as would be needed for state of the art OpenGL support. But they'd rather die than
work together.

Even nVidia's history illustrates this. In its formative years nVidia desperately wanted to
use quads instead of triangles. Almost everybody else had long accepted that quads were
hopeless. No-one was writing software for quads. But NIH syndrome kicked in, nVidia committed
to quad rendering almost to spite people rather than out of expectation that it would actually
be better. And they produced the NV2 that no-one remembers or cares about any more.