On Sat, 2001-12-22 at 17:27, Anders Johansson wrote:
Far better than the OSI compliant drivers you get with Matrox.
I disagree. The G450 is not comparable to any nVidia product; the G450 is meant for graphics and video professionals, the GeForce family is primarily for gamers and secondarily for 3D professionals, an arena where nVidia is barely dipping it's toes in the pool. Check out the scores on a 3DLabs Wildcat doing real CAD functions compared to a Quadra2 (or 3, whatever they're at these days), and you'll see what I mean.
nvidia is to my knowledge the only company that brings out drivers for linux in parallell with their windows drivers, and with equal or better performance.
I've not seen recent benchmarks on the G450, so I can't argue with that, but history has proven you right on this matter. However, the G450, last I checked, was still the fastest 2D card available for Linux, and it *happens* to do 3D instructions at an acceptable level.
Plus they have stated that the reason they're not OpenSourcing their work is that they have 3rd party license issues.
Bullshit. Licenses to whom? The OpenGL consortium? Rambus? They're just scared that somebody can reverse-engineer their hardware from the drivers faster than they can improve thier hardware, which is a mathematical improbability. The G450 and Radeon family support almost all features in XFree86 respectively, and I can't name any functions that require proprietary software to do them.
projects have died (I read that the DRI team has lost its funding. Will Matrox et al. have 3D support in future?)
They've lost funding because there aren't any new 3D chips being released, and thus no contracts for drivers for new products. When Matrox or ATI introduce a new chip that they *can't* support internally, the contracts will return. These are slim times, but it's not as bad as it appears. Matrox and ATI have done enough internal work on DRI drivers that they may not even need Precision Insight in the future; the framework for generic drivers is quite mature, and each of those companies has at least expressed a concern for OSI drivers. Without Matrox' internal driver team, the DRI for G450 would still require HALlib.a, a non-free resource. Now, it's not necessary. They even have a nice Windows-like tool for configuring their more advanced features on modern cards.
Keep up the good work, nvidia. It is appreciated.
I will not tell you to get rid of your card; one must use the products that one likes. I will say, however, that I'm not likely to buy an nVidia product until they get their heads out of their respective asses. Being able to play 3D video games faster than Jonny Redmond is about as important to me as mastering the art of basketweaving. This is mostly subjective...to each his own. :) -- -=|JP|=- Need a good geek? I'm unemployed! '01 B15 SE/PP | http://www.xanga.com/cowboydren/ | />< '95 SL2 Auto | cowboydren @ yahoo . com | _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com