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Why Linux Loses Out On Hardware Acceleration In Firefox
devtty writes with some bad news for Linux users, from OSNews: "The release notes for Firefox 4.0 beta 9 noted that it comes with hardware acceleration for Windows 7 and Vista via a combination of Direct2D, DirectX 9 and DirectX 10. Windows XP users will also enjoy hardware acceleration for many operations 'using our new Layers infrastructure along with DX9.' Furthermore, Mac OS X has excellent OpenGL support, they claim, so they've got that covered as well. No mention of Linux, and there's a reason for that. 'We tried enabling OpenGL on Linux, and discovered that most Linux drivers are so disastrously buggy (think "crash the X server at the drop of a hat, and paint incorrectly the rest of the time" buggy) that we had to disable it for now,' explains Zbarsky, 'Heck, we're even disabling WebGL for most Linux drivers, last I checked...'" An update to the story softens this news slightly, saying that "hardware acceleration (OpenGL only) on Linux has been implemented, but due to bugs and issues, only one driver so far has been whitelisted (the proprietary NVIDIA driver)."
Reminds me of a friends Radeon 9200 and/or 9600. Which is kinda funny since they are the only cards/generation which people can truly claim where superior to Nividas offerings and that was only thanks to the FX-line and the 3Dfx purchase/Xbox GPU development I assume. Anyhow, so you play some Warcraft III only, and get a Windows dialog with the message:
"ATI bla bla reset GPU/card bla bla" ... and your game quit.
Awesome! Thanks! But I guess there was a reason / issue which lead to the reset. But yeah. Can't say I trust AMD/ATI as much as Nivida, dunno what I would do if the AMD/ATI card actually benchmarked better, but that's not very likely to happen anyway.
Put it all together:
Decent drivers + binary drivers for lots of OSes + performance + energy consumption + CUDA + eventually PhysX (don't know how much it matter)
and it's hard to make the scale tilt to AMDs advantage.
The complication is that the freedom to pass out the product to all and sundry is mutually exclusive with getting paid for your labour. No matter what he claims, he most certainly is against people making money from software.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
He just drapes his open source goals in "freedom" rhetoric to make it sound more important.