On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Mark Vojkovich wrote: >> No, ATI makes money when IBM orders 2 million Rage chips for their next >> generation laptop. If IBM made the deal conditional on ATI providing high- >> quality, high-functionality XFree86 drivers, you can bet they would trip over >> their shoelaces in providing that. However, they don't. IBM makes the deal >> conditional on great WinXP drivers and great DX9 support, because to 3 >> standard deviations, that's what its customers want. >> >> In business terms, the Linux market is not relevant. Sad but true. > > For consumer desktop that's true. There is one potential business >case in the professional desktop market. SGI's, HP's and Sun's old >workstation customers have been moving over to Linux. All the film >studios are using Linux, for instance. The volume is small but the >margins on the professional cards is high so there is a chance that >it might actually make money some day. If it weren't for this >potential in the professional market, NVIDIA probably wouldn't have >any binary Linux drivers. The real target of those drivers is the >NVIDIA Quadro line not the GeForce line.
I've been trying to tell pretty much every person who comes to me talking about _any_ company's proprietary video hardware drivers, that those drivers were not written for fun, nor for gaming. They were written for high end 3D customers such as the movie industry, scientific, geological, medical, etc. However, some people are brainlocked to think that the drivers are written for video gaming in Linux. Nobody wants to believe that there has to be a business case for this stuff to exist for some reason, and just thinks companies write drivers like the Nvidia, ATI, and other drivers and provide them for download for video gaming or charity or something. With your permission, I'd like to be able to forward your email to people in the future, to help them understand this right from the horse's mouth so to speak. And if so, I thank you very much. ;o) > Ironically, the Linux desktop community doesn't target the >only potential business case there is. It's often at odds with >it. Workstation users like a platform that doesn't change and >anything that risks damaging OpenGL behavior (like RandR support >or alpha blended cursors) is generally not well accepted. Indeed. With new features getting added each release, it's hard to both progress toward the current technology trend and also sustain a stable supportable platform, while also supporting the latest video hardware. To stick with an older XFree86 release for example, means you might not get the latest features, but your X server does not change drastically every n months. However, then when a new video card comes out and you need to use it, you have no choice but to upgrade to a new XFree86 release. I see this very problem very often, and it's not easily solveable IMHO, because you've got the needs of the end user, the needs of the OS vendor, the needs of the driver developer/provider and the needs of the X11 implementation project all conflicting to a certain extent (while overlapping in others). I believe however that it is possible to increase the overlapping of needs in the mid to long run, and minimize the amount of conflicting needs, but it will take time to get there. > As for the viability of a particular market, here's an example. >Yahoo's business section lists NVIDIA as having 1513 employees and >revenue over the last year was $1731 Million. This is revenue of >over $1 Million per employee per year. That 1513 includes everybody >including secretaries, etc... so there is obviously well over a >Million dollars revenue per engineer. One man year of extra work >is generally expected to generate at least a Million extra dollars >of revenue. If a particular market can't generate that, resources >are best allocated to another project. That backs up what I've been trying to say the last 3-4 messages very well, only again with less verbiage than I, and with more numerical information. ;o) I think I can just about shut the F up soon now. Thanks. ;o) Take care, TTYL -- Mike A. Harris _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
