OSNews

It's not naïve at all. There have been benchmarks comparing the closed NVidia driver underclocked to the same core speeds as the open source nouveau drivers, and the Nouveau drivers outperformed the NVidia drivers. What will happen is Gallium3d is rapidly gaining OpenGL 3.2/3.3 support, OpenGL 4.x features are already being implemented. The GL levels will catch up to NVIDIA's closed drivers. The performance is already very good, core clock/memory clock not withstanding (and that's already being reverse engineered quickly, checkout the link in the feature matrix for clock speeds). As that work gets implemented it's going to become much easier to get newer cards supported. Each new generation of cards doesn't need to have the entire GL stack reimplemented. As much as possible is being rolled into Gallium which is lowering the needed dev time to get working drivers. Geforce 9x00 to 6x0 series cards are already very well supported and gaining quickly. Most of the "Red" is on old cards that no one should be using anyway. VDPAU support is mostly implemented. Based on current progress two years is actually a pretty good estimate. I've been following this stuff for more than 10 years, I've also done enough development and been around the Linux Game Development community to be able to say that this is coming along unbelieveably well. It's going to be like the Wifi drivers, in Two years graphics card support will Just Work on Intel/Nvidia and maybe even on ATi (I won't hold my breath on ATi).