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ATI Radeon Released
Dwayne Mulford writes: "ATI has released their new RADEON with 64MB of DDR memory. It's clocked at 183MHz and really gives the NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS a run for its money. ATI has their product info here and Sharky Extreme did a review of it here."
Hey, if they want to shoot themselves in the foot, they're allowed.
On the other hand, one wonders exactly how many of these cards they would actually sell simply due to a full suite of Linux drivers.
Just how big is the hardcore gamer/linuxgeek crossover? Obviously they're the most VOCAL ones on the internet, and so it seems like there's bunches of them. But I'd be willing to bet that a WAY disproportionate amount of them have web pages and are active on discussion boards etc.
The high end gaming card market is being driven by people running Windows. If ATI loses all of their potential Linux clients, how many would that add up to? Hundreds? Let's be honest here.
Writing and supporting a driver well is not all that cheap for them. Publishing the specs is.
I'd rather have a well written community based driver than a poorly written ATI one.
Greg
Something to remember about video cards...
640k should be enough for anybody!
oh, wait...
GRAPHICS CARDS WITH 64 MEGABYTES OF RAM AND COOLING FANS.
try to sell THAT to someone 10 years ago. -i- wouldn't have believed it.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
My life is complete. It's the feature I've always wanted!
I'll be interested to see how this one does.
Consumer 3D acceleration has advanced at a phenomenal rate in the past few years, for two main reasons.
Firstly, until now everyone has been chasing SGI's taillights. SGI and OpenGL pretty much defined how to do fast 3D, so hardware and API designs have evolved toward that goal in a fairly consistent manner. (Except for a few unsuccessful oddballs like the NV-1 and D3D-RM.)
Secondly, it started off as a wide-open market with no entrenched leader. Lots of competition, leading to low prices and very fast product cycles.
This picture is starting to change, which is why I wonder whether the rate of progress is going to slow down. Firstly, consumer hardware has now caught up with SGI. SGI's "high bandwidth throughout the box" systems still win for some workstation apps, but there's no gaping chasm in speed or features any more. We're in uncharted territory now, and there's much less agreement about what the next goals should be. If every vendor starts innovating along radically different paths, apps will have a harder time using them all, and without app support the upgrade cycle is broken.
At the same time, the competition is thinning out drastically. ATI is now just about the only significant competitor to NVidia; 3Dfx is just about hanging in there but is suffering from repeated slippages and is going to have a very hard time catching up. These days NVidia is very, VERY influential in defining the direction of Direct3D, and will become more so now that they've been selected for X-Box. Remember that D3D (unlike OpenGL) has no extension mechanism, so a D3D version written to favour one vendor is a huge competitive advantage - if other vendors can't get their features exposed then they've effectively wasted a generation.
I'm a big fan of NVidia. Their hardware is superb, their drivers are excellent, they have a serious commitment to OpenGL and cross-platform support, and they contribute a lot to the graphics community in terms of research. But I'm not sure I'd like to see a total NVidia monopoly on consumer graphics. For that reason, if no other, I hope Radeon does well.
Never mind the ethical dilema of supporting hardware manufacturers who "do the right thing" for us free software proponents, even if it means giving up a few features every now and then. Frankly, I'm not about to shell out that kind of cash to anyone unless I know I'll be able to support the hardware years from now when it becomes outdated. When's the last time you saw a modern driver under Windows for the GD5380, or S3/968? Telling me to buy new hardware is NOT why I run Linux/BSD.