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Modern Video Cards with Open Specs?
JessLeah asks: "I've been having trouble finding decent, 3D-accelerated drivers for video cards (of late-90s/early-2000s vintage) under Linux. I'd just get a newer card, but it seems like the situation for newer cards is even worse. The market at present seems to be little more than an nVidia/ATI duopoly, and neither nVidia nor ATI have open specifications available for their chipsets. As a result, both of them presently have binary-only, x86-only, Linux-only XFree86 drivers as their sole alternative to Windows. Are there any modern chipsets (with a reasonable cost) that actually have open specifications available online -- or, at a minimum, open-source drivers that can actually compile on things other than Linux/x86" What was the last video card with open specifications that you can remember?
I know it's still not what you're looking for, but nVidia's binary drivers are not exclusive to Linux. I use them with much success on FreeBSD.
They're even in ports.
Really, the problem is that they're IA64/IA32/AMD64 specific (they aren't just x86, they're available for those three archs).
Think about an operation system. Any operating system. Now, the chances that this operating system has drivers for any Matrox cards is about 95%. There are only a few that are not supported.
The big deal with Matrox is that they don't do tricks in their drivers. Everything is hardware accelerated (and that's why Matrox cards are so expensive).
BTW, I still have a Matrox Millenium (about four years) laying in a Pentium II and still kicking ass.