LWN: Comments on "Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)"

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

anton — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:50:53 +0000

So, do we have open drivers that work perfectly in Linux (compiz, 3D games like UT2007, etc.) and play the latest crop of games in Windows at the same time?

I have been using ATI R2xx-R4xx cards with free drivers for quite some time; currently I am using an X850XT (R480). I have played a bit with Compiz (from some Knoppix Live CD) for a while, and it worked nicely. I have also played UT2004 and it works acceptably (at about half the frame rate of Windows) on cards with 256MB, but on a few levels there are graphics errors; I expect that these are fixed in newer versions of the driver (I am using Debian Etch, i.e., somewhat oldish). Concerning UT3 (there is no UT2007), I have not tried it. More interestingly, you may also want to run free games: for (at least) FlightGear you need to do some additional setup stuff to make it playable.

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

Baylink — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:17:47 +0000

I, myself, am sticking with 

"NVIDIA's fully featured Linux graphics driver is provided as binary-only because it contains
intellectual property NVIDIA..." does not want to get caught having violated someone else's
copyright on.

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

cortana — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 16:09:46 +0000

I think that you are being disingenuous when you say that there is no tweaking required. I had
to enable a magic option (EXANoComposite) in my xorg.conf file in order to get anything
working at all on my Samsung Q45 (Intel X3100 powered). Without it, no icons or fonts are
rendered). If I was not an expert user, I would not have known where to begin looking for help
on this one.

NVIDIA == support problems

dwheeler — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:51:05 +0000

There are lots of market surveys for video cards, e.g.:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20071029062106...

http://xtreview.com/addcomment-id-1771-view-ATi-vs-Nvidia...

The basic bottom line is that NVIDIA, Intel, and ATI are popular,
but it's hard to say NVIDIA dominates the WHOLE market.
NVIDIA is popular at the high end, Intel is popular on Intel chips
(esp. laptops), and ATI is popular on AMD chips.

I don't buy the argument that the large number of crashes is
due primarily to NVIDIA's popularity.  There are LOTS of complex devices
in a modern computer. Fundamentally, if a particular driver is one
of the primary causes of an OS crashing, then the driver is bad.
By definition!

Video? You mean that chip on the motherboard?

ekj — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:27:15 +0000

Today, if you want high-quality audio you use a -digital- output from your computer and let
your external amplifier do Digital-analog-conversion AND amplification.

No sense in having half a dozen separate digital-to-analogue circuits of high quality when a
single one will do just fine.

NVIDIA == support problems

alankila — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 01:32:00 +0000

While it's appalling that display driver related crashes together make about 50 % of the
crashes, the number of crashes attributable to NVidia seems related to its popularity.

For instance, the Steam hardware survey grants lion's share to nvidia:
http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

If anyone knows a better data set, enlighten me...

NVIDIA == support problems

dwheeler — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:11:20 +0000

In other words, if you use NVIDIA, prepare for serious support problems. And this isn't just a pretend scenario. Fedora users couldn't upgrade to Fedora 9, because NVIDIA couldn't be used with Fedora 9. We'll see more problems like this.

NVIDIA doesn't "support" Linux, if by support you mean that you're likely to be able run your system well into the future. It has binary drivers that run on a few specific versions of Linux, but might not run in future versions. Any user with an NVIDIA card has to think several times before upgrading anything, even if it's a security update, because it may break their display driver.

This isn't really just a Linux issue. NVIDIA has good technical specs, but I think NVIDIA's excessive secrecy results in terrible quality for everyone. For some info on serious problems with NVIDIA and Vista, see InformationWeek article, Ars Technica, and Mary-Jo Foley.

30% of all Vista crashes were caused by NVIDIA according to one report.

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

pointwood — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 11:12:45 +0000

Going to do the same here. I'll be building a new desktop pc soon and it will feature an
AMD/ATI card. Nvidia is simply not an option.

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

tzafrir — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:40:20 +0000

I made a live Cd with games for someone. Worked nicely on my Intel. Didn't "work" on his
nVidia. Even though I had all the required packages (probably).

And even to get that far I had to go through extra setup.

Would I recommend anybody to buy nVidia? sure no. I'd like to make it easy for me to help
people.

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

alankila — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:19:22 +0000

It might work but my impression is that it works slowly. Gaming is an important application
for me and the only reason I keep That Other OS around, for instance. At the moment I find it
impossible to find even a review that would compare some Intel chipset against the latest, or
even older crop of NV or ATI hardware.

I've historically always got bad experience with AMD/ATI hardware, although it must be said
that the laptop I am typing on is based on X1250, and it is the first time that 3D seems to
work. It did sure have trouble before with compiz: at some point using xserver-xgl did the
thing, then xorg update broke that for months, then it started working again, but the display
flickers a bit, especially with non-fullscreen video modes. Plus I can see a diagonal line on
the screen during screen updates, it must be rendering the screen as a texture with two giant
triangles. And it works quite slowly...

So my opinion for the two reasons above is that NVidia is still the king.

By the way, I think it is acceptable level of "tweaking" that one has to do something like
"apt-get install nvidia-glx" or "apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx". If I recall correctly,
that is pretty much all it takes today to have them work. (And Ubuntu naturally suggests
installing this stuff using that restricted driver thingy.)

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

tzafrir — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 19:15:26 +0000

If you are a pragmatist then you should know that intel hardware actually works. No tweaking
required to get it working. It is certainly good enough for compiz and other basic OpenGL
stuff. AMD/ATI will have free drivers soon enough, hopefully, and then their hardware will
Just Work as well.

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

alankila — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 11:16:35 +0000

I for one wish to thank nvidia for what I have always felt has been the best graphics hardware
for Linux. Looking back at a decade timescale: without it, we might have had nothing that
works in practice, as the ATI drivers have always been crap and nobody else has any
performance.

I view myself as a pragmatist and do not care for open vs. closed as long as it works and does
what I want. I'm just an end user after all.

However, this decade-long love affair will end if a high-performance open source driver for
ATI or Intel catches up. All else being equal, openness wins. Obviously. So, do we have open
drivers that work perfectly in Linux (compiz, 3D games like UT2007, etc.) and play the latest
crop of games in Windows at the same time?

Video? You mean that chip on the motherboard?

man_ls — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 10:31:08 +0000

The problem with audio is not the number of bits in the digital part, but the quality of the analog components: they must be well done and perfectly isolated from electrical interference. Otherwise there is buzzing, hisses and all kinds of electrical noises when you record sound. OTOH the average integrated audio chipset is perfectly adequate for Skype or WoW, so there is no need to spend more.

At least a couple of years ago if you really wanted professional audio you needed a discrete card. I don't know if things have changed much.

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

drag — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 06:13:47 +0000

> Now, I don't know if Intel does those same things or not.  I would like to find out!

They have to if they want to have full multimedia support for Windows Vista. Which is
something that they, and their board of directors, is going to want very very much.

Never

AJWM — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 20:28:50 +0000

I've never bought an Nvidia graphics card, and never will if they maintain that attitude.
They certainly have the right to conceal their Imaginary Property through trade secret rather
than copyright or patent, but the rest of us have the right to not give them our money.

I used to do just fine with cheap graphics based on old chips.  When I finally needed 3D
performance (for the FLOSS FlightGear FlightSim), I got an ATI 9200 based card, the last that
ATI released info on before they went closed.  With AMD opening up the specs, it will be
ATI/AMD for my next upgrade.

(And if I should ever get the need to play closed-source games, I'll get a game console.)

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

zooko — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:49:21 +0000

Okay, that's a good point.  I agree that releasing hardware specs is an important part of
openness.  Intel had fully supported, fully open-sourced drivers for years, but didn't have
open hardware specs until recently.

However, ATI/AMD isn't perfect.  They apparently withhold some of those specs in order to
protect their DRM schemes, and their strategic plan apparently involves spending their
engineering and marketing resources to produce and distribute closed-source drivers to
customers in order to support DRM.  See this long thread on Phoronix for details:

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7647&...

Now, I don't know if Intel does those same things or not.  I would like to find out!

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

renox — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:05:49 +0000

>>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.<<

Not really: for the "pure performance crown", NVidia has been consistently the best since the
9700/9800 days where ATI was the best.

For the performance/price ratio (which is much more important IMHO), you're correct that both
are very competitive, which is great, especially now that AMD/ATI has opened its spec..

Main memory is high-speed RAM?? Look more carefully.

renox — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:51:08 +0000

You selected carefully the facts which support the GPU in the CPU approach omitting the other
facts: the memory bandwidth of the RAM in the GPU is in fact far higher than main memory's
bandwidth and the quantity of RAM present in a GPU is bigger than CPUs caches.

So if your textures fit in the GPU's memory, in many case the standalone GPU will be faster
that the GPU-in-CPU..

IMHO, the GPU-in-CPU will be interesting for the 'low end' of the gaming market which is also
the one with the biggest number of users (maybe also for some scientific computations this
remain to be seen).

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

Zack — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:08:27 +0000

>Linux is actually stronger as a result of real companies putting billions of dollars into
research and development; this cannot be duplicated (yet) by open source efforts

It doesn't work that way anymore. and it hasn't for a long time.
Those billions of dollars by "real companies" are spend *on* open source efforts.

>and the resulting intellectual property has to be protected. 

Almost any discussion about "intellectual property" is meaningless. What *exactly* has to be
protected here ? It is important to be exact because, from a Free Software and open source
point of view, opinions might vary wildly depending on what exactly someone is referring to by
using the (often deliberately obtuse) term "intellectual property".

>Failing to recognize the basic economics of the situation will lead linux down the wrong
path.

How does "linux" fail to recognize the basic economics of the situation ?
As I understand it, it caters to many commercial interests and does so rather well.

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

dlang — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:43:41 +0000

and if they slow down on R&D it won't be as useful to reverse engineer their work as their
competition will walk away from them

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

tyhik — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 08:13:45 +0000

"I don't see how nouveau would solve the problem that the manufacturer of a product is not
willing to release how the product works."

There's a possibility that nouveau (current or future) developers' brilliance will shed enough
light to inner workings of the hw so that it'll become pointless for nvidia to maintain their
closed driver. This pointlessness might be a stronger argument than minute effects of floss
enthusiasts' buying decisions on nvidia hw sales.

"Do you really think it's ok to always play catch-up and reverse engineer what is willingly
hidden?"

Yeah, with nv's current pace it'll remain hard. But nv may be forced to cut expenses (read:
slow down on r/d) in the future.

NVIDIA JUST LOST ANOTHER CUSTOMER

einstein — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:58:23 +0000

> While most Linux software is complete garbage written by clueless idiots

OOPS troll alert -- don't feed the troll...

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

ncm — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:21:18 +0000

This sort of announcement is similar to the typical corporate "we have no plans to do X"
announcement immediately before doing X.  Corporations are not monoliths.  Often the faction
that controls PR is trying to use it to enforce their preference, and the announcement signals
a battle for influence.  If you are in a position of substantial purchasing power, you may be
able to tip the balance now if you communicate it clearly enough.

Video? You mean that chip on the motherboard?

drag — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:58:33 +0000

Well look at this way:

Mobile computing is the wave of the future, and present for that matter. Graphic cards are
going to be limited by the amount of power they can get out of a battery that is small enough
that a human can carry it around without getting annoyed about the weight.

Another way to look at it:

For modern PC the amount of I/O it can perform is a huge bottleneck in performance. This means
the amount of time it takes to shuffle information from one side of the computer to another
side. And it's not just bandwidth, it's latency.

So you have, on your computer, some very high bandwidth RAM on a PCI Express card. 512Megs.

Then you have your CPU at the far end of that PCI Express bus, with it's own memory, say 4GB
that is slightly slow. It has Level 1 and level 2 cache that is even closer to the CPU because
your CPU burns through dozens of cycles every time it needs to access main ram.. RAM is just
that slow compared to the CPU.

So a modern 3D environment there is a great deal of 3D processing going on both your CPU and
your video card. A large amount of texture data, and other things, need to be read from main
memory over that PCI bus to that PCI card and then read into that PCI card's memory.

That is _slow_. Many hundreds of cpu/gpu cycles. Thousands. Energy being wasted, time being
wasted, no processing being done.

Now imagine instead of sticking that powerful GPU and memory on the far end of a PCI-E bus
that it was a bit closer? Say... On your CPU die running at, or near the same speed of your
CPU? Sharing the same memory manager, sharing the same high-speed ram? Instead of wasting
thousands of cycles your wasting maybe 1 or 2 to communicate?

And lets suppose, that instead of having to use proprietary drivers and having the GPU exposed
through a limited OpenGL API or shading language that you can simply use ISA extensions
(think, mmx/sse/sse2/etc on steroids) to the x86 instruction set to compile and access the GPU
directly so that it can be easily be exploited for purposes other then just graphics
processing?

That is were things are going. :)

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

tajyrink — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:16:02 +0000

Of course they concentrate on the kernel part of the thing, not mentioning eg. what happened
with Fedora 9 when a distribution didn't want to delay progress because a proprietary driver
vendor didn't release a driver that supports new X.

And the same happens all the time if anyone wants to try out eg. even development trunk of
X.org or other software - proprietary drivers break and cannot be fixed.

Since they are sure about themselves, or the sound of the letter is that there are zero
problems with closed drivers, it'd be fun if they had tried to somehow explain how it's best
that distributions choose old software so that NVIDIA's drivers work.

I'd really have expected some sort of attitude change from NVIDIA at this point, but
interestingly, no.

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

asamardzic — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:13:56 +0000

I mostly agree with your statements: when you're in high-end stuff, things get complicated
between open source ideals and needed features/performance...  I was mostly in OpenGL
programming, and tried all three of big guys in last couple years.  Intel is very nice indeed,
but performance, as well as support for newer OpenGL features is lagging.  As for ATI, I was
long keeping a machine with Radeon 9000 around, and again open source driver was working
acceptably (not so good as Intel drivers, there were always a bug or two here and there), but
performance and support for newer features was not good.  I used ATI proprietary driver on a
machine with Radeon x200, and it was unacceptably buggy.  Eventually, after long avoiding it,
I ended up with a machine with an NVIDIA card, and proprietary driver of course, and I must
confess I am very happy so far - the performance is great, the driver is rock-solid, all the
new features are supported, and even CUDA, that I eventually got involved with, is very good
supported under Linux.  So, while it is indeed very disappointing to read above statements
from NVIDIA, at the moment I find it hard to think about switching to any of alternatives.

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

jmorris42 — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:00:38 +0000

> 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.

NVIDIA JUST LOST ANOTHER CUSTOMER

dulles — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:32:30 +0000

Good timing for this article, because I'm about to build a new gaming machine. My old Nvidia
card/driver never worked right with Linux, and I even had trouble with it on Windoze. While
most Linux software is complete garbage written by clueless idiots, at least you can see the
code. Nvidia can keep their "intellectual property", along with their junk drivers. Nvidia
just lost another customer.

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

jordanb — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:19:44 +0000

I just love to sink my feet into a nice lawn of astroturf on a Friday afternoon.

It's one thing to hide Verilog it's another to stuff huge binary in my kernel

johnh500 — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:57:08 +0000

Sorry about the confusion; I'm lately finding that reading the RTL for our chip designs in my
own company is the only way to figure out what the crazy hardware guys are up to...

Anyway, you raise a good point: NVIDIA's documentation has always been their weakest point,
assuming you can even find the documentation. I should mention, however, that they do have a
public, documented SDK, and a huge variety of companies are using it to create their own
(proprietary, usually!) applications. The medical industry, for example, has some interesting
high-end, super high resolution flat panels, with drivers that they wrote, using NVIDIA SDK
APIs. Likewise for the movie industry, and so on.

Drivers in mainline kernel not necessary

brouhaha — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:53:44 +0000

I don't care whether the drivers are in the mainline kernel. I only care that they are under the GPL or other suitable open source license.

It's one thing to hide Verilog it's another to stuff huge binary in my kernel

khim — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:45:57 +0000

However, open source is not an issue for these users; they only care about results: does it work, can it be supported.

The question is support, of course. RedHat will not offer you support if you are using binary driver. Ditto for kernel developers. The same for many-many other people. It's quite clear and consistent stance: Linux is free, you can stuff it with binary wireless drivers or graphic drivers but don't come with questions and bugreports in this case.

When was the last time you were able to read the Verilog RTL that explains how Intel's CPU's work, for example.

Looks like you are diliberately confusing things. It's one thing to request verilog - may be it'll be useful, but it's not needed to program chip, only to build it. It's another thing to request documentation - this is a must and Intel's CPU documentation was always very good. nVidia noes not offer anything at all - not even chip interfaces! And with things like CUDA it starts to look more and more like another proprietary OS in the control of your computer. Thnx but no thnx. AMD and Intel now offer quite good documentation and looks like AMD offers good performance as well so there are noreason to stick with nVidia at all. You can expect even less tolerance to the users who are using nVidia drivers from now on.

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

johnh500 — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:24:54 +0000

Most linux users, especially most developers, will not need the high-end 3D graphics and
computational capabilities of NVIDIA's latest offerings.  This allows users to pick and choose
between AMD cards (sometimes almost as good as NVIDIA's, though usually with a worse
price/performance ratio, and less reliable across the board); Intel integrated graphics (10x
to 1000x worse than a discrete graphics card), generally for simply 2D use; and open-source
drivers for NVIDIA (dicey, but ok for simple stuff).

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.  However, open source is not an issue for these users; they only care about results:
does it work, can it be supported. And considering that NVIDIA's support is very strong, the
end users get precisely what they need.

It is long past time to look at the problem to be solved, rather than some random aspect ("is
it open source") of the problem. Linux is actually stronger as a result of real companies
putting billions of dollars into research and development; this cannot be duplicated (yet) by
open source efforts, and the resulting intellectual property has to be protected.  When was
the last time you were able to read the Verilog RTL that explains how Intel's CPU's work, for
example.  

Failing to recognize the basic economics of the situation will lead linux down the wrong path.
There is a place for closed source, and it is in the largest, most expensive research areas.
Again, how many chip companies release the source code to their drivers? Some, not all, and it
generally depends on being able to protect their silicon-based designs fairly secret.

Thanks for reading.
--JH

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

vmole — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:40:50 +0000

Then I'll reiterate my position of buying no nvidia products, or products containing nvidia chips, supported or not.

Video? You mean that chip on the motherboard?

faramir — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:35:25 +0000

I've been thinking for a LONG time, that there probably are real limits to how much
graphics/audio computing power that we need and that those limits are based on human
physiology (limits of perception).  I think your comment about audio cards actually supports
this idea.  When 5 channel 16+bit 48Khz sound is on the motherboard, just what more do we
need.  OTOH, imaging seems to be a long way from human limits.  Until we have picture window
perfect
real-time rendering with 3D display capabilities, there will still be room
for improvement that the average user would find useful (or at least "attractive").  And thus
the graphics card will survive.

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

jwb — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:11:49 +0000

ATI released their documentation before Intel.  Prior to ATI's specs, the Intel driver was GPL
but the only people who had enough documentation to work on it were all Intel employees.

Now that both companies have opened up the data sheets, anybody can work on the driver.

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

zooko — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:59:52 +0000

Wait a minute -- didn't ATI/AMD's openness just *catch up* with Intel?  Is there any openness
that ATI/AMD are practicing with their graphics hardware that Intel wasn't already practicing
for the last couple of years?

Video? You mean that chip on the motherboard?

dmarti — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:45:55 +0000

By then, PC OEMs will be buying separate video cards for about as many machines as they're buying separate sound and Ethernet cards for today. Remember 3Com and Creative Labs? (I remember seeing that it costs a PC manufacturer an average of an extra $15 in parts, labor, and expected warranty service to offer a feature on a card instead of the motherboard -- anyone else seen this number or have a citation?)

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

drag — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:32:59 +0000

(not that I dislike Intel now or anything like that. I still like them quite a bit for having
good open source drivers)

Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

drag — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:28:20 +0000

Yes. The amount of help that is coming out of AMD is admirable. 

They've released documentation, firmware, and other things. They even released the firmware
that they use for developing their own proprietary drivers. 

Their openness so far has outstripped what we got from Intel by a large margin. 

All sorts of stuff like that:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=am...

Like I mentioned in other articles we have open source 3D acceleration for R500 series
chipsets right now. I can't recommend it since I don't have one and don't know how stable or
complete the OpenGL support is right now, but if you want to become a part of the solution
then the R500 stuff you can buy nowadays is going to be x1650 and x1650pro. Pretty much the
modern equivelent of what the ATI 9200 was.  This is bleeding edge stuff, right now. So keep
that in mind.