On Sun, 20 Jul 2003, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Jul 2003, Daniel Stone wrote:
>
> >> No, there you are exagerating. I hardly doubt that they would go broke
> >> or whatever if they released open source drivers. If anything, they
> >> would sell more boards.
> >
> >Not very many, and their competitirs would then have access to all their IP, so
> >could out-do them in the next generation of cards.
>
> I doubt that it would involve hardware as much as it would
> involve the driver aspect and the JIT compiler for the GPU
> perhaps. Having never seen the complete source code of any
> modern proprietary full featured video driver however, it's very
> hard to say.
Drivers show hardware limitations and workarounds for hardware
bugs. If your competitors know where your bugs and performance
bottlenecks are, they will use that to their advantage. Their
developer relations and marketing will try to get these features
into benchmarks and games so that your hardware looks bad.
That's not being overly paranoid. That's the way it works.
The goal of every vendor is to have a benchmark make their
product look good and their competitor's look bad. The
competition in this business is really ugly.
I'm positive that any graphics hardware vendor that released
source to all their graphics drivers would be out of business
pretty quickly. The first big blow would come from their
competitors, then the stockholder lawsuits would finish them
off. The only way they can release any source code at all is
to make sure that it's free of sensitive information, which is
too much work to do on any large scale. It's not likely to
even be considered since there's no tangible benefit to it
in the first place.
Mark.
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