[ Thanks to Patrick
Mullen for this link. ]
“While most of the mainstream computing world has been
enjoying 3D acceleration for quite some time now, open-source
operating systems such as Linux have been slow to adopt the new
technology. Well, maybe Linux wasn’t slow to adopt, but more
the software was not there to support nor was the spotlight so
brightly shined on open source and Linux like it is now.”
“GNU/Linux has spawned many great things, but one of the
greatest is XFree86, Linux’s (and other *NIX’s) version of the X
Windows System. XFree has taken a while to mature, just as Linux
has, but very rarely is a first implementation of anything, on any
operating system quite this solid. This is the case for the modular
architecture that is accompanied by DRI in XFree86 4.x.”
“If you’ll go back about four years ago with me to the time of
the 3dfx Voodoo chipset and the NVidia RIVA 128 chipset, you’ll
certainly see what I mean. OpenGL and even Direct3D implementations
were shoddy, unstable, and slow-at least by today’s impressive
standards. 30 frames per second (what many gamers rate their
performance by) was seen as exceptional, and while the chipsets
couldn’t handle much more, the drivers, if optimized to today’s
standards, could have also squeezed quite a bit more out of those
now archaic chipsets.”