<Warning lengthy reply>
So is the linux kernel playing catch up with some other kernel/os? I thought that Linux was pretty much a frontrunner. Also, I've noticed that certain GUI aspects of certain OSS window managers were finding their way into other places like the Windows desktop. Also, if games need to stop supporting such big and powerful cards as Radeon 8500s and 9700s then you might want to take a look at what is wrong with the game software and not the hardware or OSS drivers. Sloppy coding is after all sloppy coding. GIGO. But hey what do I know. I don't play 3D games they give me motion sickness. However I do like to do the occasional 3D graphic design, and would like to get into 3D movie making. Which is in essence a major part of 3D games. However the day I need to go out and buy a $400 video card to play a $50 game is the day I stop buying games. Oh wait, I've already done that. ;)
Seriously though, most of the "3rd party" OSS writers are professional coders. I would say they are at least as capable of writing drivers as the manufacturers, and maybe a bit better, since they don't have to deal with a corporate boss telling them it needs to ship yesterday. Also most commercial coding projects I've ever seen have groups in the low teens if that many, so an OSS project with a few dozen coders is likely to out-perform *any* commercial vendor. It's not the matter of playing catch up, it's a matter of needing to reverse engineer the hardware that is so time consuming. All in all, there are places where Linux is trailing, but not due to the quality or ability of the coders but due to the head-in-the-sand attitude of certain corporations. On that note expect the SuSE distro to get more and more sophisticated and have better and better support for hardware. If I am reading the currents right, SuSE is heading in the direction to get more and more big industry names to port code to SuSE. I may be switching back to SuSE someday soon.
Just my 2 cents, Brian J.D.
--- Justin Dugger [email protected] wrote:
Do the open sourced drivers perform well under intensive games? It seems a bit useless to have open drivers that perform only marginally better than CPU processing of GL commands. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to dispairage ATi, it's open source efforts, or it's users, I'm just heavily skeptical of a third party competing with a manufacturer.
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I've seen plenty of ATi horror stories on slashdot and linux gaming sites, probably slightly more than I've seen nVidia. Given the fast pace of 3d graphics cards, I'm not sure a volunteer open source effort can accomplish anything significant. One thing that appears obvious is that OSS consistantly trails behind industry leaders of various software components,
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with only a few dozen contributers, and only when the list grows into the hundreds can a project really move past incumbants. Perhaps Open Source is a living counterexample to the Mythical Man Month argument?
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