Games doesent work in Fedora test 3
Mike A. Harris
mharris at redhat.com
Fri Oct 24 07:01:39 UTC 2003
On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Joe wrote:
>>Why not, if you're playing all of them on an Nvidia card. What you don't
>>realize, is that once you install the Nvidia drivers, you nullify any kind of
>>practical support you could get for any 3d application. If you've got a
>>problem with it, bring it up with Nvidia, since they're the only ones that
>>can help.
>
>I think his point is that all fc t3 users will have problems with these
>games. Dismissing him with a wave of the hand because he's using an
>nvidia card may work for awhile, but eventually there may be some brave
>souls who venture to attempt games with non-nvidia cards, and when they
>see the same problems and worse, the problems will get the attention
>they really should be getting now - you create a sort of vicious cycle
>when nvidia cards are really the only practical choice for a linux
>gamer, but users of nvidia cards are shouted down when reporting bugs.
And you misunderstand that wether or not someone here would like
to solve an Nvidia user's problem, that we cant fix bugs in
Nvidia's drivers, and we can't easily even debug them to find out
where the problem could be. It's just not something we can do.
There are hundreds of capable engineers out there and
programmers. Is there anyone reading this list who thinks they
can debug a 3D acceleration problem with a proprietary video
driver and proprietary kernel module, without the source code,
and be able to do ANYTHING for a user having this problem? I
challenge anyone out there to do so.
Now if users have problems with open source drivers it is a
completely different story. At least the source code is there,
and some of the documentation is available to some people.
However from a Red Hat perspective, I have to make a decision
with prioritizing work. Hmm, should I spend a week and a half
debugging a 3D lockup in DRI on Radeon that happens with Unreal
Tournament 2003 (after spending $70-80 of my own money to
purchase a legal copy of the game I don't have) or should I spend
that week and a half fixing 5-10 bugs for commercial enterprise
customers spending tens of thousands or more dollars on our
products?
On a completely personal level, I'd much rather have fun
debugging the video game issue. ;o) On a responsibilities to my
employer and our paying customers level however, I can't justify
debugging video games as a high priority. The only time I can
really justify spending time debugging video game related DRI
issues is on weekends or in my own personal time.
Theoretically, if I spent all my time making video games work
with DRI, I might make Red Hat's DRI the most rock solid out
there. But then how long would I have a job here? ;o)
>I hope the development community finds a better response than
>dumping on nvidia, since nvidia might just decide it's too damn
>much trouble to support linux - and then we'll really be out of
>luck.
Nvidia doesn't provide video drivers for Linux in order for video
gamers to have working drivers. Nvidia wrote their video drivers
for high end 3D users including the movie making industry,
medical industry, geological research, and other scientific
applications. They provide their drivers freely for download to
the community for other people to use simply as a kind public
service.
If it became a problem to them to provide these drivers, they
could just as easily not allow public download, and instead
provide them only direct to their high end corporate customers in
the fields that I mention above. No video vendor out there
provides 3D drivers specifically for people to play video games -
they all provide drivers for one purpose - to make money of sales
of high end video hardware for high end business usage. The
community is just lucky that they have mostly all unified their
drivers nowadays to support all of their hardware from a single
source. ;o)
So you can very much think of all of the available proprietary
drivers out there as a charity to the Linux community, as that is
what they very much are.
--
Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat
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