[geeks] PC question

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Fri, Feb 21, 2003 at 09:59:52PM +0100, Frank Van Damme wrote:

> Not entirely true. Ati has opensource linux drivers, as has Matrox. But ati 
> has some things in their Windows drivers that they won't or can't tell the 
> xfree86/dri developers about. Eg even in their FireGl drivers for linux, you 
> find something called S3TC, which can't be in the opensource drivers becaue 
> of license issues. nVidia could release enough about their cards to enable 
> the 0,001% of users running BeOS to write an accelerated driver (or one that 
> does 24 bit colors for that matter), but they don't. Nobody's gonna tell me 
> that it is because of the technology edge they have over Ati :-)

Xfree has open source Nvidia drivers that are 24bit and accelerated (but
very badly), so it isn't exactly Nvidia's fault that the BeOS people
can't do the same.

That said, Nvidia isn't exactly the most open source friendly.  But
then, none of the companies are that great.  Last I heard (possibly out
of data with the new weather channel financed work) ATI cards had open
sourced drivers made from info provided by ATI, but they had no T&L
acceleration, let alone shader support.