Best 3D card under (Gentoo) Linux? -- ATI has gone proprietary too

["Bryan J. Smith" <b.j.smith@ieee.org>]

Casey wrote:  
> that being said i almost exclusively buy ati cards (radeon vivo, 8500dv,
> and  now a 9600pro).  i never use anything other than 2d under linux anyway
> and  just about every video card will pull that off decently nowdays under
> xfree.

ATI, nVidia, Matrox and most other vendors maintain _extensive_ and quite
_proprietary_ extensions for OpenGL and DirectX.  About the only vendor that
doesn't is 3DLabs, but they don't sell consumer boards anymore (or limitedly).

nVidia currently leads the performance arena as they maintain the same driver
base across Linux, MacOSX and Windows.  nVidia has _finally_ gotten Intel off
their back on the AGPgart (long story short:  Intel cares little about AGP
"trade secrets" now that PCI-Express is here), so some (all?) of the kernel
interfaces are finally going GPL.

As far as the X/GLX driver, nVidia has to keep that closed source.  Otherwise
Microsoft (among others) will sue them.  They almost did after their XFree86
3.3.x driver release, which _was_ open source.  nVidia releases a lot of the specs.

ATI used to through the R200-series.  But the newer R300 (Radeon 9500+) and R400
series are now closed spec.  The good news is that ATI is developing the same
cross-platform driver approach as nVidia.  So the performance will be improving.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith, E.I. -- b.j.smith@ieee.org
Engineer, Technologist and School Teacher
--------------------------------------------
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