On Monday, August 07, 2006 7:33 AM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I also heard that at that time the Intel chips were > available on motherboards, but not on plug-in cards. > > Has the situation changed?
Not as far as I know. If they have made any PCI-E graphics chips, they have not yet achieved any market penetration. Integrated graphics motherboard chipsets use main memory for the video frame buffer and soak up main memory bandwidth. This was a bad idea when Apple first did it and it's still a bad idea today, but it _is_ cheap. That being said, integrated graphics motherboard chipsets do a reasonable job for many 2D applications. Still, a little bit of extra resources on the motherboard would be extremely cost-effective and you would then have little incentive to buy a separate graphics card, unless you were a hard-core gamer. Since most motherboard vendors also produce graphics cards that sell for more than the motherboard, you can see why this is not done. This creates a real problem for open-source projects, since nVidia and ATI graphics chips dominate the market for even mid-range graphics cards. Since the end-users we need to interest, if we are ever to break out of the expert niche, will run X and use GUI's for everything, being limited to low-end 2D performance will be an ongoing problem. -- Seth Goodman -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]