Katrina, I'm not giving lectures on computer graphics here. Google has all the information you asked for. If you'd like, I can also recommend some graphics textbooks which would clear things up. Also, saying a Linux system running on a 100 MHz machine is comparable to Windows running on a 2 GHz machine is a ridiculous overstatement. They are not that radically different. If you're so convinced you can make the words best software renderer, by all means go do it. I'm sure at the very least you can wave your SIGGRAPH paper in our faces when you're done.
Josh, I'm not sure you can call it better Linux support if their 3D support is... well... really bad. They may have opened up their hardware spec so that the free drivers can get rolling (I have tried the new drivers in Fedora 13 and they are quite good so far), but the free drivers are at least a year behind their Windows counterpart in terms of supporting the full features of the cards. There is virtually zero shader support in the free drivers at this point. nVidia's drivers, on the other hand, may be proprietary, but at least you can get decent 3D performance out of the machine on a current distro. The proprietary ATI driver has decent support and performance, but it won't run on anything newer than Fedora 11. (Sorry if I keep referencing things in terms of Fedora versions, it's my distro of choice.) I'm all for free software, don't get me wrong. I would love for nothing more than to have free alternative drivers for ATI and nVidia cards, but if gaming is really going to be commercially viable on the Linux desktop it's the performance that matters. No publisher is going to bother trying to ship a game for Linux where the poor driver support is going to cause them support headaches all day long. --Bob On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 4:38 AM, joshua simmons <simmons...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 > > _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders
