Open Source 3D Games

[Justin Dugger]

Do the open sourced drivers perform well under intensive games? It
seems a bit useless to have open drivers that perform only marginally
better than CPU processing of GL commands. Don't get me wrong, I don't
mean to dispairage ATi, it's open source efforts, or it's users, I'm
just heavily skeptical of a third party competing with a manufacturer.
There's also the truth of depreciation: the r200 is getting pretty
old, and the r300 will probably begin to lose support from the most
aggressive games starting next year or two (Battlefield 2 cuts off
anything below a GF 5700 and Radeon 8500).

In particular, I was speaking to ATi's closed source drivers, which
service Radeon 8500 and above. I've seen plenty of ATi horror stories
on slashdot and linux gaming sites, probably slightly more than I've
seen nVidia.  Given the fast pace of 3d graphics cards, I'm not sure a
volunteer open source effort can accomplish anything significant. One
thing that appears obvious is that OSS consistantly trails behind
industry leaders of various software components, with a few possible
core exceptions like Firefox and... well mostly just Mozilla. The fact
that it's much harder to innovate than it is to imitate appears to
enable the Open Source community to play catch up with a moving target
with only a few dozen contributers, and only when the list grows into
the hundreds can a project really move past incumbants.  Perhaps Open
Source is a living counterexample to the Mythical Man Month argument?

Justin Dugger

On 8/9/05, D. Hageman <dhageman at dracken.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 6 Aug 2005, Justin Dugger wrote:
> 
> > As long as you've got nvidia, you should be fine. I've only heard
> > mediocre things from ATi.  It can be a bit tricky to get nvidia
> > working if your distro upgrades kernels faster than they provide
> > precompiled interfaces.  On the other hand, their configuration tools
> > are quickly approaching Window's click and point interface.
> 
> I disagree with your comments about ATI.  I think they are solid, reliable
> cards and the r200 DRI driver that ships with X.org gives good quality 3D
> graphics.  I have found that most people that have trouble with "getting
> these cards to work" really don't have clue one about how all the parts of
> the system interact together.  I am not saying that this is a requirement
> for running Linux, but it might be for running certain distros.  I can say
> that RedHat/Fedora will pretty much configure it for you out of the box.
> 
> You can get a pretty interface to tweak the DRI driver(s) here:
> 
> http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/DriConf
> 
> The worse problem with the ATI set of drivers is the slow support of new
> chipsets.  All of the new cards shipping from ATI now are from a series of
> chips they call the r300 series.  A r300 series driver is in the works and
> is fairly decent now, but still in heavy development.  I expect to see it
> put out to the general public in the X release.
> 
> I can't say anything about ATI's closed source drivers.  I try to stick
> with open source as much as I can for my systems.
> 
> --
> //========================================================\\
> ||  D. Hageman                    <dhageman at dracken.com>  ||
> \\========================================================//
>