ATI published specs, and everyone assumes that quality drivers will write themselves, because anyone can, if they need to, right?
Practice shows it's not that easy - proper support (good performance, 2d/3d acceleration, video decoding, etc.) for modern cards is pretty much nonexistent, open specs or not, and has been since forever.
You need to choose depending on what your needs are. If you need to actually take full advantage of a 100+ bucks card on FreeBSD, get an NVidia card.
I'd rather depend on a vendor that more or less has proved support for this platform by actually shipping and maintaining decent code (for most of the time), than to rely on some open specs and hope.
Specifications alone will not accelerate your 3d effects or decode your bluray movie
Practice shows it's not that easy - proper support (good performance, 2d/3d acceleration, video decoding, etc.) for modern cards is pretty much nonexistent, open specs or not, and has been since forever.
You need to choose depending on what your needs are. If you need to actually take full advantage of a 100+ bucks card on FreeBSD, get an NVidia card.
I'd rather depend on a vendor that more or less has proved support for this platform by actually shipping and maintaining decent code (for most of the time), than to rely on some open specs and hope.
Specifications alone will not accelerate your 3d effects or decode your bluray movie