2006/9/8, Greg DeKoenigsberg <gdk@redhat.com>:
On Fri, 8 Sep 2006, Robert Schiele wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 08, 2006 at 04:36:22PM +0200, Matthias Hopf wrote:
> >
> > There are no specs, so they cannot be published.
> >
> > Release cycles are too fast, there is no documentation even within ATI
> > or NVIDIA.
>
> You want to tell me that the driver developers at these companies work with
> the trial-and-error method? --- Well, at least that would explain the quality
> of their drivers...
Yes, actually, Matthias is exactly right.
The graphics hardware industry is in a miserable state for exactly this
reason: they *can't* collaborate. Their only reason for being in business
is to sell hardware, and to sell that hardware they must have value-add.
And since it's hard to produce *real* value-add, they instead play silly
games with drivers.
Which is why Intel's move into this space is so important. They know
that, in this case, open source *is* the value-add. A good article on
this topic:
Good but Intel only produce integrated graphics chips and with the worst performance in the market. Yes i know Intel is the bigger graphics chips vendor, but when people actually need real 3D acceleration, Intel is not a choice, they compete in a specific segment of the market, where 3D acceleration high performance is just not important. They don't need to take care about industrial secrets in theirs cards, because there is just no secrets in those specifics cards, they have just nothing nvidia or ati would like to copy.
The real value-add in ATI and nvidia is performance. Take the time to see reviews on the net with Intel 3D performance, is just miserable if you compared with ATI's or nvidia solutions even in integrated mother boards. Release cycles are too fast, because ATI and nvidia compete with each other to have the better performance and yes is normal even in windows word that the first drivers of a new release are chonky.
You can probably say's that computer is for serious business, not for games and you probably right if we are talking about companys, but home computers are a complete different story, home computers are used in several ways including games.
There is just no open source solution to high performance 3D acceleration in Linux, is because of linux developers ? or Graphics cards vendors ? or too fast Release cycles ?, i don't know, and people who actually buy this cards just don't care, they want the performance they buy for.