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The parent comment shows a lack of understanding of how graphics cards and most other kinds of technologies evolve through product generations. It assumes that reverse-engineering the 8 series is distinct effort compared to reverse-engineering older NVIDIA cards. This is simply not the case.

For one thing, as you can see from the article, the "reverse-engineering" is not the most resource-intensive part of the process of producing an alternative graphics driver. The Nouveau team already knows most of what they need to know about the cards. The implementation is significantly more work than the discovery of the functionality.

But more importantly, the various generations of NVIDIA cards are related to one another much like the layers of a Russian matryoshka doll. It doesn't make sense to create a driver for the 8 series without implementing the previous generations as functional subsets.

Similarly, it doesn't make sense to work from the outside in. Basic 2D comes before textures, T&L, and the various iterations of programmable shader models. Besides the engineering sensibility, very few applications use the most recent shader models. The leading-edge applications often trail the hardware by 6-12 months, and most applications are multiple generations behind.

The same marketing ploys that inform the parent have consumers buying cards with features they might not use until after they jump on the upgrade treadmill yet again. By the time applications start using the features, the graphics cabal will have long since started beating the drums that tell consumers that these cards are "starting to look a bit old".

Case in point: the latest midrange performance box recommended by Ars is under $1500 US including monitor, speakers, and input devices. This includes a $379 graphics card, equal to the CPU, motherboard, and half of the memory combined (or more than four times the cost of all of the memory).

If I didn't know better, I'd say it seemed like there might be something fishy about this conspicuous splurge on one item within a system that is otherwise quite modest.

It simply doesn't make sense to spend so much money on a graphics card for a Linux box. I can't imagine what I'd do with anything beyond a 7600GT, just about the cheapest card with dual-DVI. A hardware MPEG decoder would be nice, but as the article explains, there's currently no way to expose it to applications through X11 or OpenGL.

Plus, with quad-core CPUs reaching down into the sweetspot and many more cores on the horizon, the case for discrete accelerators in general is gradually eroding. Between Fusion, Larrabee, and SSE5, it's becoming more and more likely that the CPU will win the stream processing tug of war in the mainstream space.

I for one welcome the impending niche-ification of specialized graphics processors (discrete and integrated alike). I was never a fan of the clunky, proprietary programming models anyway, and common form factors were never designed to properly address the thermal dilemma of 130W expansion cards.

But in the meantime, the free software graphics community should ignore the hype and focus on implementing the subset of functionality (on as many cards as possible) that is likely to be the most useful for our application developers. Even Carmack is fed up with the marketing machine.

Enough is enough. The parent comment is an example of the strained logic that has been widely indoctrinated in the enthusiast community. It doesn't take a thermonuclear jet engine to enjoy a rich multimedia experience. Just some honesty and some efficient free software.