[geeks] Re: geeks Digest, Vol 3, Issue 43

[Gregory Leblanc]

On Fri, 2003-02-21 at 13:01, geeks-request at sunhelp.org wrote:
> From: Frank Van Damme <frank.vandamme at student.kuleuven.ac.be>
> To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
> Subject: Re: [geeks] PC question
> Date: 21 Feb 2003 21:59:52 +0100
> 
> On Friday 21 February 2003 09:37, Kevin wrote:
[snip]
> > From my understanding they cannot open the source even if
> > they wanted to do so due to technology that they license from
> > another company, but i do not know if this is true or
> > not.
> 
> 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

It's worth mentioning that ATI also has closed-source Linux drivers. 
They've made a lot of programming information available though, so
eventually there will be good open source drivers for the ATI cards.

> 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 :-)

Yes, nVidia could release a lot more information about their cards than
they do, and they could open source a lot of their drivers as well. 
Some things are covered by patents licensed from SGI and the like, and
those parts they can't release.

nVidia is as much a software company as they are a hardware company. 
They've consistently had much much better 3d drivers for MS Windows than
anybody else.  The biggest parts of the driver that they could release
would be some DRI things in the kernel modules, and a couple of other
performance gains there.  If they did so, the folks who maintain DRI in
the kernel would quickly snap up those fixes, and instead of nVidia
having that performance edge, every DRI card would have the same edge. 
If you're selling cards based on performance, then you don't want to
give your competitors an edge.  

I don't much care either way, but a friend of mine works on XFree86, so
he rants about this all the time, and I've picked it up through
osmosis.  :)
	Greg