Can I beg to differ on that point (I have an ATI card)take a few things as given and you will see that nvidia are the best choice (maybe the best of a bad bunch, but we are talking practicalities here)
I think Nvidia is probably better on this point...
premise one: the big 3 three-d manufacturers are closed source for commercial reasons (I only have the LJ article as justification for that statement, I am assuming it to be correct)..
premise two: nvidia are helpful to the point that a single end user can get hold of a nvidia engineer and solve a problem with compatibility between an nvidia graphics card and a bleeding edge dual processor opteron 64 bit motherboard (maybe it heklped that the single end user was writing the "ultimate linux box" article for LJ?). also nv have, it seems, an engineer helping linux people on online for about 50% of his working day (source again the LJ article)
"Linux Support and Documentation
ATI Customer Care receives a large number of inquiries regarding driver support for the Linux operating system.
Most of these "Linux" questions are really about XFree86, being the graphical X-Windows System that is bundled with many of the popular Linux Distribution packages.
Please note - ATI Customer Care has NO INFORMATION regarding:
which ATI chips or products are supported in a particular version of Linux or XFree86
how to configure Linux for a given ATI chip or product
when or if drivers are being developed to support ATI chips in a given version of Linux or XFree86
what features these drivers might have
Answers to these questions may be available from a number of sources in the Linux community"
ATI provides proprietary drivers and provides information to open source projects (see links below) They have also committed to at least 6 linux driver updates per year
premise three: the other 3d card manufactuers are not as helpful
premise four: 3d graphics is desirable (not true for everyone or every machine)
ATI has supplied hardware details to open source developers. ATI also provides info on how to become involved in development of open source drivers.
> > As for drivers: hardware manufacturers making specifications available > (i.e., to allow the development of free drivers), _that_ would be > positive. > >
http://dri.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/ATI
http://www.ati.com/support/faq/linux.html
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