“In order for Linux to become a successful gaming platform, it
will have to have access to the very best hardware available.
Currently, that primarily means having drivers for cutting edge
video and sound cards. In the sound card arena the two biggest
players, Creative Labs and Aureal, have already made moves in this
direction. Several video card companies, most importantly Matrox,
ATI, and 3dfx, have released information that has facilitated the
creation of Linux drivers that provide support at the level of
commercial video drivers in Windows. Much of this new hardware was
on display at the Expo, running these brand new drivers, and the
cumulative effect was to make gaming look like a natural part of
the Linux platform….”
“One of the biggest questions, however, has been whether
NVIDIA and SGI will be releasing anything as open source. I
was told that the initial release should be a binary only,
providing a drop-in solution to provide access to the supported
hardware features. After that, SGI and NVIDIA will be considering
which parts of the drivers, if any, to release as open source. No
indication was given that they’re even considering a release of the
register-level information that would be required for 3rd party
drivers to be developed. The argument, I’m told by another
developer, is that NVIDIA believes that their low-level interface
is so different that most developers, except their own, would have
significant difficulty writing adequate drivers. While their claims
about the difficulty of the interface may well be true, NVIDIA
seems perfectly willing to underestimate the programming abilities
of the Linux community.”
“Though without a booth at the Expo, ATI had representatives
present, including David Johnson who shared the stage with Loki’s
Scott Draeker for a developer session on Linux as a gaming
platform. As part of that presentation, Quake 3 Arena running on
ATI’s Rage Pro was demonstrated on a Celeron laptop. This is the
first (and currently the only) Linux video driver providing 3D on a
laptop. It clearly showed the quality and speed of the open source
Utah-GLX driver developed from the information ATI provided to
developers last year. So far, register-level information for the
Rage Pro and Rage 128 chipsets only has been released, allowing
them to function as both 2D and 3D cards in Linux. When questioned
about the release of the necessary information to make their newest
card, the Rage Fury Maxx, work as well under Linux as it does under
Windows, I was told that the release of that information will be
made on a card-by-card basis….”