I found an interesting e-mail in my Inbox today. It was from a book author that found
one of my posts about xf86-video-intel (concerning broken
tv-out support on GMA X3100 chips). It reminded me that I
wanted to write an article about graphics.
I believe we will praise Intel developers one day for having the balls
to break things for the sake of progress. But until that
glorious time comes their driver is broken to the point of not being usable, and
when it does work performance is so bad I didn't play Enemy
Territory for more than 6 months now. Even when I used
EXA it was always on the border of crashing every time I run
into some rain (8 years old game?). That also makes me fascinated by
some clever
hacks on Windows drivers that enable users to play some modern
games on their X3100 chips.
Saying all that I can get to the real point of this
article. That would be that I've just about had it with all those
Linux zealots praising "wonderful, superb, excellent,
beautiful... open source drivers from Intel"
vs. "B.A.D and evil closed source drivers from
Nvidia". Nvidia has its own share of
problems but if it works for you then it generally works really
well, as advertised. On the other hand you have constant breakages
with Intel and all these people just turn a blind eye and continue
with their crap.
Those rants are always based on this argument: "it's open source,
anyone can fix a bug". An outsider might even believe there is
this army of people out there running around doing nothing but reading
open source code and fixing bugs. That myth couldn't be farther from
the truth, which is that there are people doing that but it takes us
(end users) 2 years to get tv-out on our graphics chip. Which is at
that point obsolete anyway as Intel already launched X4 series. So,
would we really be better of with an open source nvidia driver? Or,
more important question; what in the hell are those damn bug
hunters doing when it comes to the intel driver?