Open Source 3D Games

[Jack]

<Warning lengthy reply>

So is the linux kernel playing catch up with some
other kernel/os? I thought that Linux was pretty much
a frontrunner. Also, I've noticed that certain GUI
aspects of certain OSS window managers were finding
their way into other places like the Windows desktop.
Also, if games need to stop supporting such big and
powerful cards as Radeon 8500s and 9700s then you
might want to take a look at what is wrong with the
game software and not the hardware or OSS drivers.
Sloppy coding is after all sloppy coding. GIGO. But
hey what do I know. I don't play 3D games they give me
motion sickness. However I do like to do the
occasional 3D graphic design, and would like to get
into 3D movie making. Which is in essence a major part
of 3D games. However the day I need to go out and buy
a $400 video card to play a $50 game is the day I stop
buying games. Oh wait, I've already done that. ;)

Seriously though, most of the "3rd party" OSS writers
are professional coders. I would say they are at least
as capable of writing drivers as the manufacturers,
and maybe a bit better, since they don't have to deal
with a corporate boss telling them it needs to ship
yesterday. Also most commercial coding projects I've
ever seen have groups in the low teens if that many,
so an OSS project with a few dozen coders is likely to
out-perform *any* commercial vendor. It's not the
matter of playing catch up, it's a matter of needing
to reverse engineer the hardware that is so time
consuming. All in all, there are places where Linux is
trailing, but not due to the quality or ability of the
coders but due to the head-in-the-sand attitude of
certain corporations. On that note expect the SuSE
distro to get more and more sophisticated and have
better and better support for hardware. If I am
reading the currents right, SuSE is heading in the
direction to get more and more big industry names to
port code to SuSE. I may be switching back to SuSE
someday soon. 

Just my 2 cents,
Brian J.D.

--- Justin Dugger <jldugger at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
...
> 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 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?
> 


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