Legal crap: I work at ATI, but these are my own views, and don't reveal anything that we haven't stated publicly in a press release.
New graphics hardware from ATI and NVidia are both being developed to support MS's DirectX spec. Game developers just need to pick the level of DirectX that they want to focus on with their engine (and both companies cards support pixel shaders up to v1.3.. only ATI also has 1.4 at the moment).
So you code it once, and it works on both hardware. If you really like the ATI cards and have some time to spare, you might hack in shader 1.4 support.
As far as open source support is concerned, I believe both companies are making OpenGL extensions for these technologies available. Here you have a split in the standard, and it becomes harder to support multiple hardware with one piece of code. But the support is there, and it should be possible to have it run under any free (GNU-style and otherwise) system. As much as I don't like MS, DirectX is under more constant revision than OpenGL (from what I've seen), and does a better job of providing the features that a cutting-edge game developer would want to take advantage of.
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Legal crap: I work at ATI, but these are my own views, and don't reveal anything that we haven't stated publicly in a press release.
New graphics hardware from ATI and NVidia are both being developed to support MS's DirectX spec. Game developers just need to pick the level of DirectX that they want to focus on with their engine (and both companies cards support pixel shaders up to v1.3.. only ATI also has 1.4 at the moment).
So you code it once, and it works on both hardware. If you really like the ATI cards and have some time to spare, you might hack in shader 1.4 support.
As far as open source support is concerned, I believe both companies are making OpenGL extensions for these technologies available. Here you have a split in the standard, and it becomes harder to support multiple hardware with one piece of code. But the support is there, and it should be possible to have it run under any free (GNU-style and otherwise) system. As much as I don't like MS, DirectX is under more constant revision than OpenGL (from what I've seen), and does a better job of providing the features that a cutting-edge game developer would want to take advantage of.