Oh yeah I understand. There is only very rudmentry 3d support, in no way capable of supporting any game. My point was more on the radical rate at which they are evolving in comparison. Even the purely reverse engineered open source NVIDIA driver is out doing the proprietary one in terms of 2d. Now I of course realise there is a big jump from that to capable 3d, but considering (iirc) amd have developers working on the open source driver, I see it as mainly a matter of time before it becomes a viable alternative.
On 18 Jun 2010 22:01, "Bob Somers" <magicbob...@gmail.com> wrote: 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 h... > To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: > http://list... _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders
