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AMD To Open ATI Specs
Several readers tipped us the followup of yesterday's AMD/ATI news, the new development hinted at by Phoronix: AMD has announced they are releasing the specs for all new Radeon chipsets, and will be working with the open source community to develop a fully functional 2D and 3D graphics driver. An anonymous reader opines: "AMD appears to be following in Intel's footsteps with upcoming releases. If AMD is successful NVidia will have real competition in the GNU/Linux gaming arena. While past support by ATI was unsatisfactory the new AMD buyout appears to be having some effect."
Has something to do with this news, read Red Hat and GNOME developer blog post for more information http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=302
"Steve Jobs invented the world" -- Bill W. GATES
You might have missed these ones:
Unreal Tournament 2004? Check
The upcoming UT 3? Check (Even the level editor will run on linux, yay!)
Doom up to Doom 3? Check
the Quakes? Check
How about Blizzard explicitly altering their anti-cheating stuff so that Linux users can play WoW? That's probably indicitive of at least a few hundred users.
Heck, I've played both WoW and EVE in Wine under FreeBSD. Only problem I had with either is that the galaxy map doesn't work properly in some modes in EVE.
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Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
Chances are the source code to their existing drivers have a lot of 3rd party licensed libraries, and may be covered by NDA. They'd probably have to pull a move like what Sun did with Java: release whats not covered, and let the open source developers fill in the missing (encumbered) pieces with a clean-room implementation.
So in short, no, they probably don't have driver code that they can just give out.
Game developers (especially EA) are already targetting multiple platforms: PC, Mac (sometimes), Xbox 360, Wii, PS3, PS2, DS, and PSP to name the main platforms of the present. Only a grand total of two (which combined make up a small percentage of the market) use DirectX APIs while the rest use OpenGL or OpenGL-like APIs. Hell, combine the PS2, Wii, and DS, and you've already covered an enormous amount of the market, and none of them use DirectX at all.
By the way, PC gaming is practically a niche when it comes to gaming, especially now that Nintendo released the Wii which appeals to many non-gamers as well. Of course, that might be why Linux rarely gets PC game ports due to being a niche of a niche so to say.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
I ask what thousands others have asked: Why not use cross-platform technology in the first place? DirectX is limited to XBox and PCs running Windows. Everything else is OpenGL. Things like SDL handle both just fine.
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
They are not only giving out their specifications for free (not under an NDA like it was with the R200 OSS driver), but according to Michael Larabel from Phoronix they will release complete 2D driver code with the new driver early next week, and a 3D skeleton driver will follow later. From that moment on, the complete Radeon lineup from the 7xxx to the HD 2xxx will be supported out-of-the-box by Linux.
This will put a lot of pressure on Nvidia. They will have to open up too or become the new stepchild of the Linux community.
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat