news.com.com— Intel on Wednesday released open-source software intended to give Linux full-fledged 3D graphics support and to give the chipmaker an advantage over rivals ATI Technologies and Nvidia.
Aug 9, 2006View in Crawl 4
I think allot of people are coming at this from a gaming perspective and are missing the market applicability. Granted many of the people on this board will drop $150-300 on a graphics card alone (or god knows how much for a quad SLI setup). However, on an overall outlook there are many more people who have no desire to play quake. For me personally, my 3D graphics needs are limited to acceleration on an XGL or AIGLX desktop under Linux, period. Now, having tried to get a 3D desktop working under Linux 6 months ago with an integrated ATI 200m was horrible experience. So much so that I finally decided it would be easier just to Ebay the damn thing and buy a laptop with an Nvidia chip instead. Bingo, much better driver support and it took a fraction of the time. What I had not even considered was that my Laptop had a switch that let me choose between an integrated Intel graphics or the super duper Geforce chip. Well for giggles and grins I set up another configuration using the integrated Intel with AIGLX. Much to my surprise it was even easier to setup and it works just as good for the eye candy desktop. My Windows giggle and the desktop cubes spins with the same pretty effects. The biggest thing is that the battery life on the Intel chip mode is about 40minutes longer per charge, plus I didn't have to do any special kernel compiling form the command line to get a proprietary driver to work. Don't get me wrong. I like to play games, but if I want to play 3D games I have an Xbox 360 and a modest home theater.
Gamers overemphasis their importance. Builtin chips like this are 3d chips and will work just fine for most people. So you cant play games, well most people dont play games and therefore dont care.its like a bunch of race car drivers demanding that a toyota camry be able to go 200mph, the average driver certainly doesnt care about that ability.
@khyberkitsune: Umm.. have you ever written with either? Your statement makes no sense at all.. DX and OpenGL are both just graphics APIs to abstract the notion of triangles, vertices, attributes, shaders, draw calls, etc. Both of them go through the same driver, and 99.9% of the processing is done by the driver itself. There is no 'microsoft stuff' inbetween, the graphics driver handles the DX runtime info directly (same with GL).At this point, both GL and DX are pretty good at what they do, neither is significantly faster, although I would argue that OpenGL is superior, and if MS didn't kill it on windows by not supporting anything after 1.2, it'd be the dominant graphics API today.
blueringAug 10, 2006
I think allot of people are coming at this from a gaming perspective and are missing the market applicability. Granted many of the people on this board will drop $150-300 on a graphics card alone (or god knows how much for a quad SLI setup). However, on an overall outlook there are many more people who have no desire to play quake. For me personally, my 3D graphics needs are limited to acceleration on an XGL or AIGLX desktop under Linux, period. Now, having tried to get a 3D desktop working under Linux 6 months ago with an integrated ATI 200m was horrible experience. So much so that I finally decided it would be easier just to Ebay the damn thing and buy a laptop with an Nvidia chip instead. Bingo, much better driver support and it took a fraction of the time. What I had not even considered was that my Laptop had a switch that let me choose between an integrated Intel graphics or the super duper Geforce chip. Well for giggles and grins I set up another configuration using the integrated Intel with AIGLX. Much to my surprise it was even easier to setup and it works just as good for the eye candy desktop. My Windows giggle and the desktop cubes spins with the same pretty effects. The biggest thing is that the battery life on the Intel chip mode is about 40minutes longer per charge, plus I didn't have to do any special kernel compiling form the command line to get a proprietary driver to work. Don't get me wrong. I like to play games, but if I want to play 3D games I have an Xbox 360 and a modest home theater.
etx313Aug 10, 2006
Heh, what an asshat.
Closed AccountAug 10, 2006
Gamers overemphasis their importance. Builtin chips like this are 3d chips and will work just fine for most people. So you cant play games, well most people dont play games and therefore dont care.its like a bunch of race car drivers demanding that a toyota camry be able to go 200mph, the average driver certainly doesnt care about that ability.
khyberkitsuneAug 10, 2006
This account has been closed by the user
tranixAug 10, 2006
Linux support is the primary determining factor on my next $500+ graphics card purchase...
evoguyAug 10, 2006
@khyberkitsune: Umm.. have you ever written with either? Your statement makes no sense at all.. DX and OpenGL are both just graphics APIs to abstract the notion of triangles, vertices, attributes, shaders, draw calls, etc. Both of them go through the same driver, and 99.9% of the processing is done by the driver itself. There is no 'microsoft stuff' inbetween, the graphics driver handles the DX runtime info directly (same with GL).At this point, both GL and DX are pretty good at what they do, neither is significantly faster, although I would argue that OpenGL is superior, and if MS didn't kill it on windows by not supporting anything after 1.2, it'd be the dominant graphics API today.