I wouldn't worry too much about losing NVIDIA in the desktop space, just so long as we get three things:
1) Good graphics competition from Intel. So far their chipsets have been severely lacking, to the point of being sluggish even in 2D acceleration.
2) Lightweight (read: non-catalyst) Windows drivers from AMD. NVIDIA drivers install cleanly onto a system with no fuss and no additional bullshit. Ever since the introduction of CCC, AMD drivers have been bloatware. You used to be able to get the drivers without it, but AMD has been pushing it hard lately.
3) Decent AMD drivers for linux. I'm really impressed with how well documented and easy to use the NVIDIA drivers are for linux. It's gotten to the point that regardless of cost and performance, whenever I'm about to put together a non-Windows machine, I just get an NVIDIA graphics card by default.
@kleptophobiac AMD catalyst drivers have been non-problematic for ~3 years now. AMD apparently realized the maxim "fancy chips with bad drivers are just really expensive glass", and reformed the hell out of ATI's completely unworkable drivers. Even in infamous and universally reviled Vista (thanks Aero!), little irks like mode switching have been smoothed over.
And more importantly, AMD open sources its device specs, which is why in a growing number of cases the open source AMD drivers are the most performant drivers out there. You might not care now, but when you're running WebGL in ChromeOS in another three years and its leaving everything else in the dust, I think people will begin to reconsider.
Maybe that's true for their newer products, but their newer drivers for older products have gotten worse. I have a Radeon 9800 in my desktop and recently reinstalled with Windows 7. When I went looking for drivers, I found that I couldn't get ones without all the Catalyst bloatware.
Two or three years ago when I did this the last time, I was able to find WDM style simple drivers from ATI for my card. Now I can't do that anymore. You download the bloatware version and the checkbox to get rid of it is grayed out. Makes me sad. I shouldn't need the C# runtime environment for my graphics card driver.
And it's really good that AMD has released the datasheets for its parts, but that's something of a token gesture. Implementing the software to use it still takes lots of manhours and the open source drivers are still lagging far behind the NVIDIA proprietary drivers. The AMD linux drivers were a pain to package the last time I did it (about six months ago).
The biggest barrier here is honest high end competition in discrete graphics from Intel. The other two things aren't so hard to accomplish. NVIDIA has been doing it for years and it hasn't seemed to be much of a tax on their business. AMD just hasn't bothered yet.
@kleptophobiac intel isn't very good about doing supports for drivers unlike nvidia, you get updated drivers almost monthly or quarterly and the drivers trickle down to older cards unlike amd/ati or intel i740???
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I wouldn't worry too much about losing NVIDIA in the desktop space, just so long as we get three things:
1) Good graphics competition from Intel. So far their chipsets have been severely lacking, to the point of being sluggish even in 2D acceleration.
2) Lightweight (read: non-catalyst) Windows drivers from AMD. NVIDIA drivers install cleanly onto a system with no fuss and no additional bullshit. Ever since the introduction of CCC, AMD drivers have been bloatware. You used to be able to get the drivers without it, but AMD has been pushing it hard lately.
3) Decent AMD drivers for linux. I'm really impressed with how well documented and easy to use the NVIDIA drivers are for linux. It's gotten to the point that regardless of cost and performance, whenever I'm about to put together a non-Windows machine, I just get an NVIDIA graphics card by default.
@kleptophobiac AMD catalyst drivers have been non-problematic for ~3 years now. AMD apparently realized the maxim "fancy chips with bad drivers are just really expensive glass", and reformed the hell out of ATI's completely unworkable drivers. Even in infamous and universally reviled Vista (thanks Aero!), little irks like mode switching have been smoothed over.
And more importantly, AMD open sources its device specs, which is why in a growing number of cases the open source AMD drivers are the most performant drivers out there. You might not care now, but when you're running WebGL in ChromeOS in another three years and its leaving everything else in the dust, I think people will begin to reconsider.
@rektide
Maybe that's true for their newer products, but their newer drivers for older products have gotten worse. I have a Radeon 9800 in my desktop and recently reinstalled with Windows 7. When I went looking for drivers, I found that I couldn't get ones without all the Catalyst bloatware.
Two or three years ago when I did this the last time, I was able to find WDM style simple drivers from ATI for my card. Now I can't do that anymore. You download the bloatware version and the checkbox to get rid of it is grayed out. Makes me sad. I shouldn't need the C# runtime environment for my graphics card driver.
And it's really good that AMD has released the datasheets for its parts, but that's something of a token gesture. Implementing the software to use it still takes lots of manhours and the open source drivers are still lagging far behind the NVIDIA proprietary drivers. The AMD linux drivers were a pain to package the last time I did it (about six months ago).
The biggest barrier here is honest high end competition in discrete graphics from Intel. The other two things aren't so hard to accomplish. NVIDIA has been doing it for years and it hasn't seemed to be much of a tax on their business. AMD just hasn't bothered yet.
@kleptophobiac
intel isn't very good about doing supports for drivers unlike nvidia, you get updated drivers almost monthly or quarterly and the drivers trickle down to older cards unlike amd/ati or intel i740???