Actually to be honest ATI have vastly better Linux support, it just does not extend to 3d yet. Since they opened the specs for their hardware, and now support the open source driver, it is making leaps forward. This is in stark contrast to NVIDIA's totally closed development. I mean NVIDIA don't even support kms because the kernel exports for it are gpl only.
On 18 Jun 2010 20:43, "Bob Somers" <magicbob...@gmail.com> wrote: Yeah, no offense, but I don't think you fully understand the differences between the CPU/GPU. The fact that you can get Linux running on a lower powered machine doesn't mean much when it comes to raw graphics horsepower. These resource "savings" are almost entirely on the CPU/RAM side. A software renderer would run just as poorly on a Linux machine as a Windows machine because a CPU is not designed for graphics processing, it's designed for serial, general purpose computing. The hardware graphics pipeline gets you matrix/vector computations, per-vertex lighting, view projection transformations, clipping and culling, scan conversion, texture lookups, and in modern hardware, vertex and fragment shader engines and geometry tessellation, all massively parallel in hardware. Even a low-range GPU can crank through graphics operations like a hot knife through butter compared to a high-range CPU. It's not a matter of having extra "resources". The point is that those extra "resources" won't get you very far compared to a hardware graphics pipeline, because they're not specialized. Modern CPUs run best when context switching is kept to a minimum, because they have huge cores that offer a lot of general purpose functionality. GPUs have (nowadays) hundreds of small, highly-specialized cores designed specifically for the operations in the graphics pipeline. There's not a whole lot consumers can do to get ATI to up their game on their Linux drivers, other than contact them and complain about driver support. Honestly the best thing that could happen right now to level the playing field is to have a major game publisher (anybody at Valve reading this? :D) announce Linux support, preferably with a "runs best on nVidia because their Linux drivers don't suck" campaign. Big companies like ATI don't respond to something until it bites them in their pocketbook. --Bob On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 1:48 AM, joshua simmons <simmons...@gmail.com> wrote: > You will never... > _______________________________________________ > To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or v... _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders
