[MPlayer-users] Re: best graphical card for mplayer

[Jonathan Rogers]

D Richard Felker III wrote:
> If they're playing games they should probably have a wintendo... I
> don't see any point in putting a fancy 3d accelorator into a unix
> system unless you're doing 3d modelling or something.
> 

It may come as a surprise to you, but there are actually quite a few 
*nix users that play 3D accelerated games. The only reason I still have 
Winders installed is for a couple of games, but I'd love to get rid of 
it. Using Wine (and OpenGL), I almost can.

There's even a Nethack interface that uses OpenGL; I know it's 
frivolous, but it's pretty cool. Do you think Nvidia and ATI develop 
their 3D drivers primarily for modeling applications? I imagine there 
are many ancient *nix admins that consider it silly to play movies on 
"real" systems. Remember that Free Software is about freedom.


> Providing a driver is NOT a beneficial act on nvidia's part. Rather,
> it reduces the demand for a free driver (because lots of fools will be
> happy with the buggy x86-only proprietary one), discouraging people
> from spending their time reverse engineering the hardware and writing
> a driver because there's already one that's "good enough".
> 

I've always disliked using a proprietary driver, but is it even feasible 
to reverse engineer hardware for functions as complex as 3D 
acceleration? Obviously, Nvidia should release enough specs to 
facilitate driver development. I wonder what it would take to bring this 
about.

Jonathan Rogers