RE: Open Source Supported Graphics Cards
On Monday, August 07, 2006 7:33 AM -0500, hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
> I also heard that at that time the Intel chips were
> available on motherboards, but not on plug-in cards.
>
> Has the situation changed?
Not as far as I know. If they have made any PCI-E graphics chips, they
have not yet achieved any market penetration. Integrated graphics
motherboard chipsets use main memory for the video frame buffer and soak
up main memory bandwidth. This was a bad idea when Apple first did it
and it's still a bad idea today, but it _is_ cheap. That being said,
integrated graphics motherboard chipsets do a reasonable job for many 2D
applications.
Still, a little bit of extra resources on the motherboard would be
extremely cost-effective and you would then have little incentive to buy
a separate graphics card, unless you were a hard-core gamer. Since most
motherboard vendors also produce graphics cards that sell for more than
the motherboard, you can see why this is not done. This creates a real
problem for open-source projects, since nVidia and ATI graphics chips
dominate the market for even mid-range graphics cards. Since the
end-users we need to interest, if we are ever to break out of the expert
niche, will run X and use GUI's for everything, being limited to low-end
2D performance will be an ongoing problem.
--
Seth Goodman
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