On Fri, 28 Sep 2001, Carl Busjahn wrote: >Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 11:30:11 -0400 >From: Carl Busjahn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed >List-Id: <dri-devel.lists.sourceforge.net> >Subject: Re: Re: Radeon 8500, what's the plan? > >I have to disagree. If people are really concered about performance >they should be using Linux anyway.
That is not disagreeing. ;o) I agree, people concerned about performance should be using Linux. >What David said is also true. I'm not going to reccomend a >company that doesn't support Linux. We also know that Online >games require good bandwidth, and the Linux tcp/ip stack just >tears up anything you can get from Microsoft. Linux could >EASILY become the de facto gaming operating system. Yes, it could become that. In order for that to happen though, certain things need to occur, including: 1) Companies such as Loki, and others need to have a large enough market to sell to in order to remain profitable. 2) People have to actually *buy* those games. 3) Drivers have to exist to push the hardware For it to truely be successful, drivers need to be released for the hardware at the same time as they are released for other platforms such as Windows. For that to happen, the hardware vendor has to believe they will see a return on their investments to write those drivers or pay someone to do so. If they do envision the market as being there, or at least recovering their development costs, then they wont likely write drivers. Simple economics IMHO. Any totally open source driven project to write such from the ground up, even with specs, is going to trail behind Windows-land in a game of catch up. There has to be a 'big enough' market to drive things to happen. I fully believe that Linux has the potential to become a screaming game platform, but that is something that is in the future - maybe 6 months, maybe a year, maybe 3 years. Who knows. Right now, there isn't a lineup of people outside Walmart running to buy Linux games though, and so it makes sense that hardware vendors are going to allocate less resources to making these things happen. Again, the potential is there, yes. The actual reality is that the people who are interested in Linux games succeeding right now seem to be a small group (yourself, and myself, and probably a number of people in the list here for example). Me and you, and the others who want to see games succeed, do not quite seem to stimulate enough interest, or revenue to make it worthwhile for someone to fund development. I have faith that this will indeed change. When is hard to say. What can we do to change this? 1) Buy all of Loki's games. If you plan on buying a new game, and a Linux version is available - get it instead of the Windows version. Same for other companies making games for Linux. 2) Buy hardware from vendors supporting open source, and let them know what you're using it for. The more people who do #1 and #2, the sooner the market will expand to a mass that is critical enough for hardware vendors to envision making some serious returns for their investments in writing drivers, or funding driver development. Just some more food for thought.. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mike A. Harris Shipping/mailing address: OS Systems Engineer 190 Pittsburgh Ave., Sault Ste. Marie, XFree86 maintainer Ontario, Canada, P6C 5B3 Red Hat Inc. Phone: (705)949-2136 http://www.redhat.com ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris Red Hat XFree86 mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] General open IRC discussion: #xfree86 on irc.openprojects.org ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# rm -f /bin/laden _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
