Originally posted by Aristotle
I never understood why these hardware companies kept their drivers closed. They are in the hardware business. Anything that helps them sell hardware is a good thing. [/B]
The issue here is certification, or that's what I'm sure someone would say. At least for the professional gaming market it is. WPL Certified Drivers, basically assuring that everyone is on as level of a playing field as is possible. At least that seems to be how nVidia approaches their drivers.

That's pretty niche on the whole, and really most people aren't going to give a good fuck either way. I really think these days the only people to whom driver stuff is much of an issue would be the "fringe linux crowd." And really, I don't think making your shit open source is going to change all that much. ATI needs all the help it can get with its drivers, but on the big stage (ie - Windows), I don't think it's going to help them out all that much. But then again, I doubt I'm going to be touching an ATI card in a gaming rig any time in the next 10 years, so I'm not the kind of person they're trying to market to.

On another note, I think this purchase will make an interesting battlefield out of the console market... the companies not being totally fucking retarded (ie. - everyone but Sony) and paying $82376594837625 to make their own processors... it's all about ATI vs nVidia vs Motorola... though motorola mostly deals in the handheld market. Right now Nintendo and XBox both use ATI GPUs for the Wii/360... amusingly enough the Gamecube used ATI but the first gen xbox was nVidia (which is why they have the stupid compatability list, they have to emulate the xBox on the 360). It'll be interesting to see how the trend ends up going, and who's processors will be paired with the gpus from here on out. And which end they'll cave on AMD vs Intel on the CPU or ATI vs nVidia on the GPU. It'll be a couple years before we find out, so we'll see.