[S-99]

I'll take that correction about the motive behind the driver going opensource. The ati driver in the past and even right now after going opensource is ****. The potential for the driver going opensource will turn **** into strawberries probably over the course of a year or two.

Meanwhile, many linux users myself are buying nvidia because it's driver and support (albeit proprietary) is ****ing great. Ati right now is not very linux compatible compared to nvidia.

For my netbook though, i'm glad intel got together and made their graphics driver opensource. It does have great support and works good. Among that it's one of the reasons that after installing linux i don't need to install an extra driver for 3d acceleration. Even the intel graphics driver is loads better than ati's.

[Nuke]

i always figured ati for a bunch of windoze fanbois. seems they have really good performance while running d3d, but not so good on opengl. nvidia on the other hand seem to want to support as many platforms and apis as possible and are actually interested in marketing to the linux (and osx?) user. i pick nvidia becasue i want something that has comparability in my favor. i know d3d games, after a couple new versions of direct x, just wont work very well or at all. its sad that a lot of good games just cant be played anymore without a nostalgia rig or some kinda emulation software.

[S-99]

The more platforms you support awesomely the more you'll sell, increasing the more popular you get the more you'll sell.

Ati with their ****ty linux driver did in fact do a lot of good for nvidia.

Linux is becoming more of a force to reckon with. In the past not many companies provided driver support for linux because everyone uses windows and it wasn't worth said company's time. That slowly changed thank god.

[Nuke]

linux has always had its niche in the server market though. where it hasnt been used as an os for pcs, it had been running most of the internet for a long time.

[S-99]

Niches tend to change, thx to ubuntu. The past decade was all about linux maturing to desktop use.

Also for years linux powers a great deal of mobile devices too. Even in some printer brands.

[Ziame]

On the topic: PhysX isn't really anything worthy, so I wouldn't recommend you to buy a card specially for it. I checked (Shadowgrounds: Survivor) if there's a difference in having or not having extra hardware for that (on my friends' computer). No change, or so slight you can't even notice it.

[Nuke]

the only way physx will go anywhere is if the api is made opensource and ati are allowed to support it on their cards. i like the idea of physx, but not enough game devs are using it.

[Bobboau]

there are quite a few open source physics engines out there, many of them will be using OpenCL soon.