[Wine] NVIDIA OR ATI

[Daniel Kasak]

On Mon, 2008-10-20 at 21:48 -0500, Austin English wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 9:40 PM, Daniel Kasak
> <daniel.kasak at 247realmedia.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2008-10-20 at 21:16 -0500, vitamin wrote:
> >>  What you need Wine for? To run closed source software??!!
> >
> > Actually the only closed-source software I currently use is Komodo and
> > IE7, and I don't use Wine for either of them ( and I need IE7 for
> > testing ).
> 
> Then how are you running it?

VirtualBox ( yes, the open-source edition, and yes, we have a Windows
license ). It's faster and it 'just works'. Plus you can use IE7 - I've
only been able to get IE6 running in Wine. Also, Flash stuff is very
slow and flakey under Wine.

> While work may inspire you to disregard your principles, others see
> gaming in a similar light. While it may not put food on the table,
> they do need higher graphics capabilities for their games. Open source
> drivers (at the moment), simply don't make the cut.

Yes and there's a reason for that. It's been discussed to death already
in other places, but the gamers' "quick fix" solution of running to
Wine / Cedega ( not to mention nVidia with their MAAAAAX framerate ) is
largely to blame for this. This is why there is:

1) Very little interest in writing native Linux games
2) Very few people working on OpenGL support that never gets used
because of 1).

nVidia have their unified driver architecture that helps them bring
OpenGL functionality to Linux without them having to actually _do_ too
much work. Of course their closed-source kernel module is illegal, but I
concede that this doesn't appear to matter to gamers. Whatever.

> For that matter, a game developer using Linux would NEED those drivers for work.

A game developer using Linux could quite easily FIX open-source drivers
to work. John Carmack, for example, worked on mesa to fix some driver
issues while working on Quake for Linux. This type of work must be
applauded. But unfortunately he's the odd one out, and many more
developers ( if they work on a Linux version at all ) think they only
have to deal with nVidia's binary driver, and can safely ignore
everything else. I'm subscribed to various X-related mailing lists
( xorg, mesa, dri, xf86-video-ati ), and I don't every recall *any*
contact, whether in the form of bug reports, patches, or just a quick
'hi there' from any commercial game developers.

Dan