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I don't see how nVidia is being hypocritical here at all or "talking out of both sides of their mouth"; it's their right to contribute what work they want to.
by binarycrusader 14y ago
I don't see how nVidia is being hypocritical here at all or "talking out of both sides of their mouth"; it's their right to contribute what work they want to.
Meanwhile, nVidia continues to have the best 3D Display Drivers on Linux, Windows, OS X, Solaris, and FreeBSD.
In contrast, the open source drivers even after having years of access to complete specifications to the 3D/2D-portions of hardware AMD provides has barely gotten OpenGL 3.x working and performance is barely half the commercial drivers in many cases.
- lucian1900 14y agoActually, there are not in fact complete specifications for AMD hardware, only bits and pieces. Also, writing drivers is hard and the open source ones were written from scratch. They're pretty good for (low) amount of effort put into it.
- binarycrusader 14y agoActually, there are in fact complete specifications from AMD for the 3D aspects of the hardware: http://developer.amd.com/documentation/guides/pages/default.aspx#open_gpu Yes, they omit parts that are covered by macrovision copy-protection and the like, but those are not necessary for full 3D support. That is why I qualified my earlier statement. The real reason is as you pointed out, writing drivers is hard and the skillset is scarce. I just wanted to point out that most people believe the myth that full specifications == instant, great open source drivers.