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."

Comments

Re:Linux gaming arena?

[SpeedyGonz]

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

Re:What GNU/Linux gaming area?

[lordtoran]

In other words, someone needs to make a convincing (read: easier than DX) interface to OpenGL+SDL, and put it under a commercial-friendly license, and convince people to use it to build X-platform games. SDL is a compact and less complex than DirectX interface to OpenGL/Direct3D/framebuffer, audio, input devices and event handling. Countless games and top-notch engines are written around it. Plus it is under the (commercial-friendly) LGPL. The people behind all this try very hard to offer an easy yet powerful cross-platform development framework. Yet developers seem to prefer complaining about the cost and complexity of porting games.

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.