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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."
I guess this development will have an effect on my fanboyness towards nvidia . . .
I am a gamer and the only reason I run windows now days is because most of the games use DirectX. Perhaps with driver support from ATI and Nvidia more people will start writing in openGL because they will realize there is a market for gamers on Mac, Linux, and Windows. Just because people use Linux does not mean they do not play video games. Thats why we all have windows boxes so we can play the games (or run wine).
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
You mean, I might be able to play Chromium?
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
The tide might just be changing. Have you looked at the ubuntu forums how many "normal people" has started using ubuntu after they found out they can actually run WoW in it?
I say a serious commitment from one of the two large gfx-chipset suppliers is extremely huge and will probably force the other one to do the same in time.
You can joke all you want, but based on my own sample of Linux gaming, it is actually doing quite well.
For example in the case of Eve Online with a few hundred thousand subscribers, an officially supported Cider (Transgaming) client is in works and under beta testing. That is from an all out Microsoft shop.
The fact is, companies are reacting to demand. There are a lot of people who would ditch Windows in a heartbeat if only for windows-only games.
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Be yourself no matter what they say
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
I read this, then the comments, and realized that a lot of people see vid cards as just gaming accessories. This couldn't be further from the truth. Look at industrial graphics and video workstations! nVidia is dominating there, and AMD is hungry for a piece of that pie. Open up docs, get the geek that the office keeps in the closet to get excited, he sends the list of the part upgrade to the boss for the graphics workstations, bada-boom AMD market share of ATI video cards grow.
The help for gaming is just incidental, AMD is keeping its eyes on the real prize, the industrial market.
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Why the hell would you want to reboot your computer just to play a game? That means your torrents go down, your network shares go down, you can't multitask email/irc with gaming, all the terminals you had open get closed and you lose your place. If you can justify shutting everything down and dedicating your hardware solely to playing games, you should have just bought a console in the first place.
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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.
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