ATI vs. NVIDIA: ATI Steals the Show

(54)T-Dub writes "Apparently a group of MIT engineers made an OpenGL wrapper for the NVidia Demo of 'Dawn.' (a fairy with high sex appeal) Even though the wrapper adds more overhead the demo still runs faster on the 9800pro and creates higher quality images." Yet another reason it's good to have engineering students on your side.

Comments

OUCH

[KDan]

That's gotta hurt... I feel sorry for nVidia... it does look like they're going the way of 3dfx... Maybe I should buy an ATI card next. nVidia do have good linux driver support, though - does ATI have that too?

Daniel

Re:OUCH

[mharris007]

That might be true, if they weren't venturing into any other computer market other than graphics. Considering they got one of the hottest chipsets (nForce 2) for AMD CPUs right now, I don't see them going completely downhill in all their computer markets.

Re:OUCH

[roalt]

Once they kill off Nvidia, they will have no excuse not to release open source drivers, there'll be nobody left to copy them.

For years, NVIDIA was the number one in 3D graphics on the PC. And yet, they did not release any open source drivers as it is considered top secret business confidentiality.

Why do you think ATI will do otherwise?

Re:OUCH

[Cloud 9]

Probably because if they don't someone else will come along (maybe even NVIDIA) with open source drivers and kill them off.

Why, in order to satisfy a few thousand users who demand them?

Get real. I'm as big of a linux fan as the next guy, but money talks. There simply isn't enough of it in the hands of users to cast a meaningful vote. That's the real reason it hasn't been done yet. There simply isn't enough cash coming in from linux users to justify it, regardless of whether or not there's licensed IP or top-secret code in there.

Re:OUCH

[Sentry21]

ATI has both closed-source drivers that really expose the abilities of the hardware, and open-source drivers which are quite reliable and not problematic at all (in my experience). Radeon support for DRI comes standard in the kernel too, as does framebuffer text console support.

So yeah, they do.

--Dan

Re:OUCH

[Fluffy the Cat]

There are open source 3D drivers for the Radeon. There are none for the Nvideas. Why do you think this is?

Re:OUCH

[Fluffy the Cat]

The open source drivers do work with GLX. I'm using them quite happily now. They don't support the 9500 and up, but that's because the DRI team haven't had time rather than because ATI are witholding documentation. As far as graphics cards go, ATI support the Free Software community far better than Nvidia do.

Re:OUCH

[Daniel Phillips]

"Probably because if they don't someone else will come along (maybe even NVIDIA) with open source drivers and kill them off."

Why, in order to satisfy a few thousand users who demand them?

Get real. I'm as big of a linux fan as the next guy, but money talks. There simply isn't enough of it in the hands of users to cast a meaningful vote. That's the real reason it hasn't been done yet. There simply isn't enough cash coming in from linux users to justify it, regardless of whether or not there's licensed IP or top-secret code in there.

It's not just the absolute numbers of Linux gamers (which are increasing exponentially, incidently) it's the fact that Linux users tend to be opinion leaders. Marketdroids understand that.

Fairies?

[IamTheRealMike]

What is it with graphics card demos and fairies? I know they're written almost exclusively by young guys, but still - the Matrox G400 had a rather curvaceous fairy for their tech demo as well. OK, so obviously not quite as realistic as this one, but couldn't they be more imaginative?

I mean if you're going to have medieval fantasy characters in your demos, might as well go the whole way and have a proper Princess.

Re:Fairies?

[Yarn]

princesses don't have transparent wings to show off transparancy etc.

Re:Fairies?

[NorthDude]

She could always have a transparent dress...

Re:Fairies?

[Anonymous Coward]

Neo: Whoa, deja vu.

Trinity: What did you just say?

Neo: Nothing, I just had a little deja vu.

Trinity: What did you see?

Cypher: What happened?

Neo: Someone posted about princesses, and then there was another post that looked just like it.

Trinity: How much like it, was it the same post?

Neo: Might have been, I'm not sure.

Morpheus: Switch, Apoc.

Neo: What is it?

Trinity: Deja vu is usually a glitch in the Slashcode. It happens when they change something.

Slashdot Effect

[keller999]

You know, when a page gets slashdotted, isn't it just coincidence when the only thing that will load is the banner ad!

Re:Slashdot Effect

[tavis]

That's usually cause the banner ad is pulled from another website.

Re:Slashdot Effect

[MarkGriz]

Even more of a coincidence (and a damn funyy one too) was that the banner ad I got was to "win an nVidia video card"

trend?

[graveyhead]

1) Get to the top of the video card market.
2) Get lazy.
3) Competitor gets to the top of video card market.

Rinse, lather, repeat as necessary.

Didn't NVIDIA learn from 3DFX? Hell, they bought them. I'm hoping this is a driver issue and that subsequent optimized releases of Detinator will speed it up. If not, it is a sad day for NVidia.

Dawn

[Whatthehellever]

...does she have a sister?

Re:Dawn

[Beetjebrak]

Yes she does, she's called Dusk and is your average gothic-esque-urban type. Check the new demos.

idea

[wiggys]

It's pretty silly paying through the nose for an expensive new graphics card when the only thing you can "play" are the tech demos.

Sure, the card is faster so you can now play your existing games with anti-aliasing on all the time (well, mostof the time...) but unfortunately your games won't look any different.

Remember the first time you installed your 3dfx card (inc pass-through cable) and played GLQuake? Amazing! High res smooth graphics on your P166, the envy of consoles everywhere. Then nVidia brough our their TNT cards which did 32-bit colour... nice. But since then, what's changed? Answer: not much. There are only a handful of games which use 50% of the features offered by a Geforce 3. I have a Ti4600 and a Ti200 and it's nigh on impossible to tell them apart.

Why the Sam Hill should I buy ANOTHER new card when there's simply no compelling reason to upgrade?

Re:idea

[Chicane-UK]

Well.. its not an alien concept to think that some people just like to have the latest hardware to be able to run the latest games as fast & at as high a resolution as possible.

I have a GeForce 4 Ti4400.. don't get me wrong, it is a quick card but there is a lot better out there.

Yeah, it sucks that I can't afford to have the latest Radeon 9800 Pro or whatever, but I can understand why people would want them.

I wouldn't mind a 9800 ready for Doom III and Half Life II though ;)

Re:idea

[Pulzar]

You're kidding, right?

ATI to Host First Public Showing of Valve's Half-Life 2 at Electronic Entertainment Expo

Re:idea

[Chris Burke]

Yeah, I remember the first time I installed a 3dfx card and played GL Quake. "Holy shit" I think were my first words, followed soon after by "Holy fucking shit". I'm fairly confident that nothing will ever recreate that experience. Going from 320x200, 256 color with speed-optimized (accuracy de-optimized) software rendering at 15-20 fps to 640x480, 16-bit color with all the goodness of OpenGL (transparency, reflections, good dynamic lighting) at 30+ fps was a revelation. It's probably going to be incremental improvements from here on out, and no mere increment will ever have the sheer impact that the first 3 seconds of glQuake had.

That said, I'm still pretty impressed with the graphical improvement since then. Compare glQuake to... Well, anything very recent that uses pixel and vertex shaders. Quake3 became a lot prettier (and faster) when I switched from a Voodoo3 to a GeForce 3. Newer games look even better (rain and water effects with pixel shaders look great). Add more trangle-processing power for more detail and the ability to have dynamic terrain (like waves in water)... I'd say we're progressing nicely.

No, there's no reason to buy a GF4 if you have a GF3. Maybe a GF5 or whatever ATI has at the time. Skip a couple generations so that your new card really -does- have a noticeable advantage over the old, and you'll be much happier.

Blah Blah Blah

[Organic_Info]

Summary of next 500 posts.

nVidia is dying...
No their not..
ATi linux drivers suck..
Ati Windows drivers suck..
No they don't....
Benchmarks mean nothing...
Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah

Stop wasting your time...everyone buys their graphics cards based on what features are important to them. Whether it is raw performance, quality, driver stability, support, supported OS's, cost, availability etc... it is most likely a comprised mix of all of the above.

Re:Blah Blah Blah

[mbourgon]

...And at least 1 comment talking about how the site is apparently using an NVidia card to serv pages.

nvidia destroyed 3dfx

[fluor2]

nvidia practically destroyed 3dfx. They bought 3dfx and refused to update any drivers (e.g. nvidia refused to update the windows xp 3dfx-driver when microsoft contacted nvidia). Thus many people had to buy a new geforce card.

i fear we all (we who had to buy geforce cards to get windows xp working/or people that heard about this story) have established a real HATE relationship against nvidia.

go go ati. best wishes!

Re:nvidia destroyed 3dfx

[zeno_2]

nvidia practically destroyed 3dfx. They bought 3dfx and refused to update any drivers (e.g. nvidia refused to update the windows xp 3dfx-driver when microsoft contacted nvidia). Thus many people had to buy a new geforce card.

Im pretty sure nvidia bought intellectual property from 3dfx, not a contract that said they had to update any drivers. They bought technology, not a promise to support cards that they didn't make. People bought Geforce cards because they were technically better, not because of a big conspiracy.

i fear we all (we who had to buy geforce cards to get windows xp working/or people that heard about this story) have established a real HATE relationship against nvidia.

I have a voodoo 5 card, that card is really only usable under win98. I dont hate nvidia for this, actually I dont *hate* anyone for it (hating someone for that is pretty silly think). Times change, technology changes, and I welcome all of it. Windows XP isn't that good anyway, I would't try to hard to get it to work =).

Re:nvidia destroyed 3dfx

[RatBastard]

3DFX was dead before NVidia bought them. It wasn't NVidia that killed 3DFX. 3DFX did that all by themselves. Between unreasonable product delays and abysmal financial mismanagement, they doomed themselves.

Graphics Wars

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess I too follow these stories closely, as I'm a fairly avid gamer. However, all this tugging between which graphics chipset company is better is likely to go on for some time. People say that NVidia is now the clear cut loser. Well, I wouldn't be so fast to judge that. I believe that like many other industries, there are two or more powerful companies that have good years and bad years when compaired against their competitor.

It seems that NVidia is having a bad year or two right now. But they're a big and resoucre rich company, hopefully know what they are doing, and were just caught off guard by ATi pushing the technology in the 9700 of last year to market so soon. I think they are operating in a "catch up" mode, desperately trying to caputre back the coveted crown of the graphics wars. And it is that preoccupation that is deriding them from true technolgical innovation.

Once NVidia resumes its roll as a technology innovator, much like ATi is now, the race once again will be on for the true champion of the graphics wars.

And when that happens, I think that is a definate signal that graphics will again become sort of the arms race of the cold war, each side battling to be "best". But better, because when you have two free market companies battling it out, it usually comes down to as much blistering performance avalible for the dollar.

And that is excellent for all gamers, and the general computing public at large.

But maybe that's mumbo jumbo, it sounds good 5 hours past my bedtime. nighty night.

Re:Graphics Wars

[Falrick]

One feather that nVidia has added to their hat in the last two years is their beginnings of diversification. No longer are the completely reliant on the consumer graphics market, what with their entry into the motherboard market. They have produced graphics chips for the XBox and have made a healthy entry into the mobile graphics chip realm. A couple (few?) years back they received a contract from the US Gov to produce graphics chips for displays in military jets (if memory serves).

They have much more going for them then being purely a gaming chip company. Given time I suspect that we'll see nVidia and ATi oscilate the leadership position. nVidia, while in the valey, has other businesses to fall back on.

While not always the case, companies with a backup plan tend to be more willing to take risks simply because if the risk doesn't pan out it doesn't spell disaster for the company. I think that we'll see more inovation coming from nVidia yet.

Re:ATI Drivers

[dinivin]

I can't speak for their FreeBSD drivers, but ATI's 3D linux drivers for the Radeon 8500 and up work incredibly well. I get better framerates with UT2003 under linux than I do under Windows with the OpenGL renderer.

Dinivin

Nvidia actually stole the show

[Blaster Jaack]

ATI vs. NVIDIA: ATI Steals the Show
I dunno if you guys heard about this one but nVIDIA actually had a e3 party then went pretty wild(some topless pics). Not only did they have Smashmouth perform at their E3 party but they also had some porn star make an appearance to(she was eventually kicked out for dancing topless on a table). Check google its all fact

Re:who cares about ATI

[lordfoul]

Yeah No kidding .. Windows is Dead, ATI should know by now that Linux is where the Big time Gameing market is.

Financials

[gwappo]

nVidia, unlike 3DFX at the time, has a huge pile of cash sitting on their balance sheet.

Although its engineers need to learn to ignore their marketing dept. the management of nVidia is pretty good

expect them to regain the crown at the NV40 marker, ATI has indicated they'd be slowing their innovation cycles, whereas nVidia has made no such statement.

Re:Financials

[thrillseeker]

nVidia, unlike 3DFX at the time, has a huge pile of cash sitting on their balance sheet.

A huge pile of cash is only indicative of the past - during the heyday of the internet bubble there were dozens of companies with huge piles of cash - a year ago United Airlines had billions of dollars in the bank too - they've barely managed to emerge from bankruptcy, and there's still much work ahead.

What matters is that a company knows what to do with the assets they have. It's awfully easy for a company to get lazy and make money in spite of themselves when everyone else is doing so too - the question is can they continue to do so when times are tough.

ATI has indicated they'd be slowing their innovation cycles, whereas nVidia has made no such statement.

... and one of them is more likely than the other to have correctly gauged the future buying needs of their customers. If the future has people less willing to pay for high-end video cards, which is a good possibility if it tracks the steadily declining sales of PCs overall, then spending megabucks to build high-end hardware is not going to do much good for the bottom line.

Re:Financials

[gwappo]

A huge pile of cash is only indicative of the past - during the heyday of the internet bubble there were dozens of companies with huge piles of cash - a year ago United Airlines had billions of dollars in the bank too - they've barely managed to emerge from bankruptcy, and there's still much work ahead.

For nVidia, its pile of cash is definitely only indicative of the past. However, in the internet bubble-days, a lot of companies had cash not because of earnings, but because of overhyped equity. Most of us know how to quickly spend a lot of money, nVidia has proven, in a most competitor-bloodspilling manner, that it can make it.

In addition, take a look at all those engineers from Silicon Graphics - when Silicon Graphics made its ill move towards "normal" servers and away from its graphics niche, all those engineers abandoned ship and signed up with nVidia.

Compare that with 3DFX, shortly before they went bankrupt they had purchased the tiny GigaPixel firm for (iirc) 1Billion USD in hopes of grabbing the Microsoft XBox contract which was at that time assigned to Gigapixel, before then, they wasted money on buying STB (don't even remember for how much there).

I cannot comment too much on Airlines since I don't track them too much (fully commoditized, too heavily regulated, no serious money to be had in any of its niche markets).

... and one of them is more likely than the other to have correctly gauged the future buying needs of their customers.

A friend of mine showed me a "handy-cam demo" of Half-Life 2, and its engine. In that demo we see the most sophisticated shaders (refraction, translucency, reflection) around, physics engine, you name it -- aside from wondering about how that much content (a _lot_ of detail in that game) could still be profitable for a gameshop, the other conclusion was that I'll probably be needing a new graphics card soon to get a decent frame rate. That kind of engine puts a heavy demand on both GPU (shaders, graphics) and CPU (physics), and I personally strongly believe that this type of engine will drive future demand for graphics cards.

Imho, The future for graphics is only in its infancy; after the z-buffer paradigm, we still have raytracing to explore. The possibilities are truly endless.

Them Engineering Students

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another reason it's good to have engineering students on your side

Yes, yet another reason. The other reasons I can think of are:

1. you need a group of people to make seem a lot cooler than what you actually are
   
2. you need to stop the flashing "12:00" on your VCR
   
3. you need other trekies who actually want to wear the orange shirt
   
4. avoid thermonuclear war
   

Any other reasons to have them on our side?

"Lazy"? Not so sure about that.

[gwappo]

nVidia did not get lazy, instead, they did the smart thing and diversified, which is why we now have nVidia in the chipset market.

Good move at the time, and a good move now as it will allow them to bridge the poor comparative performance of their graphics unit vs. ATI.

Dusk

[jawtheshark]

direct link

Mirror

[woodhouse]

If anyone wants it, I've mirrored the OpenGL wrapper here (78k).

You can get the dawn demo from here

Re:How nice for them

[dinivin]

How about these.

You want the file glx1_linux_X4.3.zip.

Dinivin

Re:How nice for them

[gamorck]

I think that you should dig a little deeper before making posts like the one above. The fact is that you can get ATI binary drivers for xfree 4.3.0 today right now. Check out the following URL for a download (GLX1_LINUX_X4.3.ZIP):

http://www.schneider-digital.de/html/download_at i. html

If you need more information on the driver - check out (may be slow due to slashdotting taking place):

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=872 f1 8f2e7271a06ab6fca8005df0028&threadid=33685530

Now that having been said I hope you'll feel the need to retract your statement regarding the lack of an ATI provided binary driver for xfree 4.3 systems. I also hope that anybody who modded up your statement here gets tagged in meta moderation as there isn't even the slightest grain of truth in your statement.

J

OpenGL vs Direct3D (here we go again)

[execom]

Again, this proves the superiority of Direct3D over OpenGL and the 'schism' between ATI and NVIDIA. Programming for OpenGL is not compatible, unless you handle all render path for all targets (take time). Such things wouldn't happens if the Dawn demo was Direct3D.This also proves that ATI could write drivers which can handle all the Nvidia OpenGL proprietary extensions (not what they doing actually). They are supporting a couple of extensions , but for example GL_NV_occlusion_query for example, is supported on my Radeon 8500. But I like to see GL_NV_point_sprites for examples (actually you can't do point sprites on ATI (ie particles) under OpenGL, except in Direct3D).Theses students should contact ATI and give the source code of their modifications for the next ATI driver.That, would be really nice and legal. These extensions are approved by OSI anyway. Sadely, for 'policy' reasons, it won't be accepted by ATI (I've already tried that in fact).
----------------

Re:OpenGL vs Direct3D (here we go again)

[Midnight Thunder]

One thing worth noting is that many of the extensions are actually listed at OpenGL.org on their OpenGL Extension Registry.

Also, adding to the reply of the parent post, OpenGL has the huge advantage of being portable. I have talked to one or two games developers who have told me that porting the OpenGL portion of their game to another platform is fairly straighforward. The remaining 5% of the work is usually politics and platform specific configurations and this is what is the hardest. BTW if my two games programmers' opinion is not representitive of the rest of the games developers, please let me know.

John Carmack explanation

[ericvids]

The John had a .plan update before which pointed out that NVidia's card is actually cranking out more precision by default compared to ATI. That could explain why ATI runs faster by default. When he used an NVidia-specific rendering path (where the precision is more or less the same as ATI's), the NVidia card actually ran faster.

Is this somehow related to the discrepancies in this fairy demo?

Re:John Carmack explanation

[baxissimo]

I don't think you have it quite right there. ATI always uses 24-bit floating point math internally per component, while NVIDIA uses either 16 or 32-bit floating point, depending on the size of the operands. So ATI isn't really using "full floating point" all the time, it's more like "3/4 full floating point" all the time, whereas NVIDIA uses the precision you ask for which is either "half floating point" or "full floating point".

Here's a quote from a review on xbitlabs

[4]: NVIDIA GeForce FX supports two floating-point data formats: 16-bit per component and 32-bit per component. GeForce FX performs 32-bit floating-point calculations twice as slow as 16-bit ones: its 16-bit ALUs have to get in pairs for 32-bit calculations.

ATI RADEON 9700 PRO supports both 16-bit and 32-bit data precision, but performs all floating-point calculations with 24-bit precision. The result can be then translated into the 16-bit format, or expanded to the 32-bit one.

Nude patch

[Otis_INF]

I haven't tested this (I don't own an FX nor an ati card with the balls to run it) but on the VE3D forums someone mentioned this to make Dawn naked:

Well for you sickies looking for the nude patch, no need. Just change the fairy.exe file name to one of two things. Quake3.exe will make her nude, and 3dmark03.exe will make her nude and wingless.

On some other forum (here) they talk about renaming some file to get rid of her erm.. cloths/leaves. :) Enjoy.

Re:How nice for them

[telstar]

"I recently spent a lot of money on a 9700 Pro, which is currently sitting atop my machine, useless."

• You realize that you've actually got to put it IN your machine to get it to work, don't you?

Re:How nice for them

[noahm]

I recently spent a lot of money on a 9700 Pro, which is currently sitting atop my machine, useless. The reason? ATI won't release a driver that works with xfree 4.3.0, and after several mails told me to just keep an eye on their site for updates. I know there are open source drivers (2d only) for the card, but those gave me really nasty rasterline flashes whenever the card did anything - so were next to useless.

It's your own damn fault, really. I recently bought an ATI AllInWonder 8500, which has kickass fully Open Source Linux drivers. I bought this card because some quick research revealed two things: 1. Its 3d performance is more than enough for my needs and 2. Quality drivers are available. Quality drivers will be available for your 9700 Pro, but maybe not for some time.

Personally, I'm not a bit upset with the way ATI handles their Linux users. I much prefer it to NVidia's binary only crap. While the full programming specs may not always be available for the latest and greatest ATI cards, they are available for stuff that's not far behind (http://dri.sourceforge.net/ indicates that Radeon cards up to the 9200 are supported.) Not only are the drivers available, but because the specs are there, the drivers can be ported to any platform, not just those that some commercial interest feels is worth its money. NVidia won't release PowerPC Linux drivers, so I'm stuck doing software OpenGL on my G4. If the G4 had a Radeon I would not have this issue.

ATI really should be commended for making the necessary info available to the DRI and XFree86 developers to write quality open source drivers.

noah

Big deal

[donscarletti]

ATI compatibility, big frigging woop!

If anybody wants to do something actually useful they can get rid of those frigging fig leaves!

I'm shocked and amazed...

[sootman]

...posting links to a sit with high-res pics of a hot virtual babe, and the server got slashdotted? I'm a-fucking-stounded. Didn't see that coming.

Re:How nice for them

[Cyno]

Idiocy would be to rush out and buy an ATI All in Wonder card after reading your post. The only features you might be able to get working are 2D and 3D acceleration, if you're lucky.

BTW, did you browse to the links you copied into your reply? There was never a mention of the 9800 series cards. So what makes you think ATI supports Linux with binary drivers? The fact that they at one time released a binary driver that's compatible with XFree86 4.3.x?

I bought like 5 ATI 7x00 cards and got maybe one of them to work. The rest are worthless POSs until XFree86 improves their drivers. I don't trust that ATI cares about this market and I will never buy one of their cards again.

Don't reply unless you can find a driver that enables the same features as the Win2k/XP drivers. If not then just accept that ATI doesn't support Linux yet.

I can't believe you got modded up. Stupid moderators.

Image quality not improved

[baxissimo]

The article claims the image quality was improved, but the first thing I noticed when I opened up the one of the 4xAA screen shots was that the antialiasing on Dawn's hair isn't working properly in the ATI version. The NVIDIA demo uses the GL_SAMPLE_ALPHA_TO_COVERAGE_ARB feature to feather out the hair at the ends. (This makes the card use the alpha value of a fragment to determine the number of covered samples when multisample antialiasing is on.)

Check out the hair on this NVIDIA shot

and compare with the hair in this shot off the ATI.

The zoom on the NV example isn't quite as close-up, but you can still see how the hair feathers away at the tips, while the hair on the ATI is all jaggy and uniform thickness right out to the tips. Like some kind of Raggedy Anne yarn hair.

So does the ATI not support alpha-to-coverage? Or did these guys making the wrapper just not translate it properly? The hair looks pretty bad without it.

I seem to remember when I saw the NV guys give the demo that they made a point of how expensive the hair was to render. Each hair is a separate GL_LINE_STRIP, there are thousands of them, and if you turn off the complicated blending and smoothing on each one of those little hairs, that could maybe add up to a large savings. I don't know, but I wonder if that would account for most of the speed-up they see running it on ATI.

Still a neat hack. It would really rock to have complete NV<->ATI compatibility dlls that would work for all apps and not just this demo.

While they may have made some slight improvement to one aspect of image quality by improving normalization, which I guess makes the lighting a little more accurate, I really doubt the improvement is all that noticeable. Maybe I could tell given a side-by-side comparison, but I doubt I would notice if only shown a version normalized one way or the other. On the other hand, that ugly hair is pretty obvious. To me that makes the NVIDIA sreen shots look better.

Re:precisely

[Fluffy the Cat]

I should clarify. Games are playable using the open source drivers. My Radeon 9000 (which is a cheap, low end card) gives me far, far better framerates with UT than the Voodoo 3 it replaced did. Do you get as many FPS as you do with the binary drivers? No. Do you get a high enough number of FPS to play 3D games at reasonable detail levels? Yes. Do you get the ability to run 3D applications without crippling the system? Yes. Can you do 3D visualisation on the desktop? Yes.

So, it's entirely acceptable for desktop use even if you're using 3D applications on the desktop. Note that "entirely acceptable" only defines the base level of performance. If your primary goal is gaming, then the binary drivers are probably a better bet - if not, then the open ones are fine.

Some things that are missing:

[Brat Food]

I was excited to try this out last night, and it runs beautifully, but after readon the comment about the hair (how its not shaded to kind of fade out), i also noticed that Sawn has no eyelashes, and aparently does on the nvidia cards. Having seen the demo on boh cards, i cant say technically why the ati does in fact seem to have a nicer overall image (is it the gamma, is it actually what rage 3d mentions?), but nonetheless, this is still a really, really cool hack. Now if we get the hairs back, can have an even match up~