the best graphicscard for FreeBSD

[Matthias Buelow]

Jorn Argelo wrote:

> It's simple why they don't make it open source. Making it open source makes it
> easier for ATi to steal their ideas and they can figure out construction of
> their GPUs (think of bugs or flaws in the driver or the architecture).

I wonder what "secrets" that might be?  After all, a big competitor 
might, in theory, have no problems of taking a disassembler or 
decompiler and just take apart the binary driver (if they need to do 
that at all).
Another question is, how much of these ideas today is in the driver, and 
how much in silicon.  I'd think that nVidia and ATI employ pretty much 
the same techniques for their chips and only the IC designs differ a bit 
(but are probably well-known to the competitor).  With the drivers 
getting bigger and bigger (the ATI Catalyst graphics driver component 
alone is over 8 megs), maybe a lot of the logics is actually in the 
proprietary driver code?
In that case, they could provide a rather basic open-source driver, 
which implements standard OpenGL stuff, and leave the high-profile 
extensions to their proprietary driver.  Or make the basic API for their 
chip available.  But then again, why should they, it simply won't pay 
off with the tiny margin that *bsd/linux users are, and 2d support is 
usually available.

-- 
   Matthias Buelow; mkb@{mukappabeta,informatik.uni-wuerzburg}.de