Linux Video Card Comparison - October 2000

The Future: Next Generation Hardware

In the past, Linux users had to watch new hardware come out to the market with the realization that it would not be supported immediately, if ever. Oh the agony, to watch a Windows user enjoying the benefits of his new 3D card knowing you'd be stuck with your older card! Thankfully, with the amazing performance of VA Linux's and Red Hat's IPOs along with the media frenzy over the last year, we have drivers for next generation hardware much faster. Here's a quick look at what's to come:

NVIDIA

Open-source advocates caution that NVIDIA's use of closed-source drivers could leave the Linux community high and dry if NVIDIA ever grows tired of supporting us. For the moment anyway, we have the benefit of very good drivers. Further, their efforts to unify the code between their Windows and Linux drivers assures porting will be easy and drivers should be available rapidly for future products. We have also heard rumors that the current drivers may actually support several unreleased/unannounced chips. This would certainly be good news, but we are unable to confirm this at this time.

The closed-source vs. open-source driver development debate is fierce in the Linux community, which shuns any code distributed in a binary-only form. To Windows users, this seems silly, but there are several reasons that open source driver development is a very good thing. It all boils down to the ability to modify or enhance drivers in the event that the supporting company is not providing important features. For example, NVIDIA must add support for new X extensions and other enhancements themselves. While XFree86's drivers (in CVS) are starting to support the new Render extension (support for alpha-blending between windows and anti-aliased fonts), NVIDIA will have to implement this themselves. As it's one of many cool new X extensions, we hope that they are following its development and plan to include it in a future release of their drivers. Open sourced drivers allow for other developers to add support for such features themselves. In this case, it would likely be implemented by an XFree86 developer. Further, by keeping the drivers closed source, NVIDIA restricts the ability of the community to port to other operating systems such as FreeBSD. Typically, companies are blacklisted by Linux users for restricting open source development. However, NVIDIA's drivers are currently very good and their hardware is excellent, so many users swallow their pride and live with it.

Matrox

We asked DRI's development team about possible driver development for the G800 card. Here's their response:

We can't talk about unreleased products at all. When we do work on a card, we have an agreement with the vendor that defines when we can talk about the work. We always try to announce the work as early as possible, (to avoid redundant work) but it is always up to the vendor to decide exactly when to announce it.

So, basically, we didn't find out anything. Given Matrox's track record, drivers are more or less guaranteed, but it would have been nice to know that they're already in development.

3dfx

As the Voodoo5 5500 worked, we would assume that the 6000 should not have any serious issues preventing it from working out of the box, though full support will likely come at a later date since the Voodoo5's dual CPU setup is currently restricted to using a single CPU. Historically, 3dfx has been a good supporter of open-source development work and releasing Linux drivers. We see no reason to expect otherwise.

ATI

The recently released Radeon is not currently supported by XFree86 4.0.x. Like other manufacturers, ATI has contracted Precision Insight (developers of DRI for XFree86) to develop Radeon drivers for XFree86 4.0.x. We have not received any word on their progress or estimated time frame of release, although we would expect that it is not far off.

Note that the new Radeon drivers involve a major update to the current Rage 128 driver architecture as well. Thus, not only will Radeons be supported in the near future, but the Rage 128 cards will receive a nice performance boost by the new driver.