Installing ATI drivers

[Sam Varshavchik]

Les writes:

> On Thu, 2007-05-10 at 18:20 -0400, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
>> 
>> Intel video is more than enough to get you reasonable 3D eye candy, and 
>> their hardware will get better over time.  Going with Nvidia today may give 
>> you short term benefits, but that will come at the expense of long term 
>> goals.
>> 
>> 
> Hi, Sam,
>     Intel certainly does create lots of great devices.  I have used more
> than a few, and overall thought they were good.  
>     However Intel has always been weak at vector and matrix processors.
> This is the area of AMD, Zilog, and a few speciality houses.


>     Companies tend to channel marketing, hiring and retention efforts on
> their core business, thus opening up to the relatively niche business
> such as vector processing and video graphics tends to be further down on
> the corporate teat, impacting growth potential, and inventiveness, and
> even inhibiting hiring  of the "new kids" with radical ideas on these
> areas.

Both AMD and Nvidia simply have a huge head start on Intel in this area.  
Intel is a relative newcomer, while both ATI (now AMD), and Nvidia have been 
in this game for years, and have opened up a huge lead on Intel.

But this is just a matter of time.  Intel has as much resources and 
brainpower as ATI, or Nvidia, if not more.  I'm expecting that over the next 
3-5 years, if they persist on their current course, their video hardware 
will close the gap and will be in the same general ballpark.  They do not 
need to technically outperform the rest of the crowd, they just need to be 
in the same ballpark.

Consider that, as well as:

1) The Centrino chipset is, for all practical matters, free.  You need to 
grab the right firmware package from Livna, but once you do that, the 
existing free kernel drivers wake up and do their job.  Maybe some day 
someone will figure out how to have the firmware image file included in 
Debian or Fedora, but for all practical matters it makes very little 
difference today.

2) ivtv/video4linux recently received permission from a certain MPEG encoder 
card manufacturer to freely redistribute firmware files for their boards. 
I've got a box in the basement running MythTV on FC6, happily filling up its 
hard drive.  Replacing its current video card with some heat generator from 
Nvidia or ATI, and then polluting it with their blobs would feel so… dirty.


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