They can't even produce decent linux drivers for their current hardware (tearing anyone?). And I don't see any indication of change in the near future, meaning more crappy binary-only drivers of which we can only consider ourselves lucky if they even work at all...
At best things will sort-of work like they do now with inferior drivers. Excuse me if I consider that "next to useless" as I know you guys just can't wait to throw more money at them for doing such an appalling job.
Well we find that with the right motherboard/processor/ram combination and UI2 + Overlay the performance is very good. We are currently using this board and are very pleased with it http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/ASUS_P5N7A-VM
Andrew
And what exactly is wrong with UI2 + alphablending then?
...UI2 + Alphablending causes degraded mpeg performance... tearing during video playback. In addition feedback from our customers told us that they found the alphablended UI confusing and it reduced usability because of that. So because of both of these issues we currently never use it for customer systems... and would not even if the tearing issue was was fixed.
Andrew
So basicly the drivers suck...
But they work and they are what we have currently. Not using them or ignoring them is certainly not going to encourage better driver support. They may 'suck' but users can get excellent performance right now...as long as they dont want 'marvel' at alphablended images rather than actually see and enjoy their video content... most people I talk to seem to want the latter rather than the former ;-)
All the best Andrew
Yeah you get excellent performance as long as you don't use the only feature that sets them apart from other chipsets that do have open-source drivers and would therfore be much more worthwhile to invest in. In other words...
We actually get excellent performance. Period... as we would not use alphablending even if it worked flawlessly. By the way we build system that use Intel, ATI and nVidia GPU's... we use each of these GPU's pretty much equally (ATI possibly a little less than the other two currently) depending on situation/needs of the system were building.
All the best
Andrew
Yeah excellent performance, right up to switching to the alpha blended UI2, which is the only reason for going with nvidia anyway. Period...
Well as I said never use the Alphablended UI - so for us its just simply no an issue. We choose our motherboards/chipsets based on energy footprint, I/O, connectivity, fanless or Heatpipe cooling and the physical size of the enclosure we can wrap around all of this. I guess you'd call this a 'platform' approach to hardware...our goal is to build/choose components that deliver reliability and stability. We're 'agnostic' about which flavour of GPU we use. Our customers really dont care which GPU is 'inside'.
All the best
Andrew
Allright then, nvidia closed sourced drivers are the best thing ever, because your customers couldn't care less, I'm glad we could finaly settle this. 
And you know, this reminds me of some other company selling LinuxMCE based machines too, who made a special deal involving closed source drivers too, didn't turn out so well for them in the end (or so I heard). Somehow their customers suddenly started caring when their machines stopped working as advertized because the drivers didn't work properly with later versions.
Well we have never made any 'deals' with anyone for 'special' graphics drivers - and we never have or will do. We use the normal/standard drivers for each GPU we support... just like all the other LinuxMCE users here on the Forum do. The most we ever do is try newer releases of the standard drivers for the GPU's we build into our products... and we always report the positive & negative impact of those experiments here in the Forum or in the Wiki for all to see and benefit from.
What other companies policies are in this area is for them to decide not ours.
All the best
Andrew
That is completely besides the point, now what if nvidia can't or (decides it) won't support newer kernel versions anymore? You'll be going down the same road, special deals or not and there will be nothing you can do about it.
Well its not really beside the point as you suggested in your earlier post that we had made some kind of deal around proprietary licensed drivers - we haven't. But if for some reason nVidia were to stop developing their binary driver (which I very much doubt they will) then we would just provide a replacement ATI based based card.
I'm really not sure what point your trying to make in this thread but if you have a personal thing about nVidia then thats fine... just dont buy their products. Such extremely 'purist' views on binary driver are something I dont personally subscribe too...but I fully support your right to hold them. However I dont think its useful to try to force this on others.
All the best
Andrew
Maybe I should have used the word "even" instead of "too" then, as I guess it is to much to expect native english speakers to do a bit of comprehensive reading.
And yeah I'm avoiding their products as much as I can, I surely don't need you to tell me that. Allthough somehow I fail to see how I'm "forcing my views onto others" though, as it's not like I'm personally stripping all nvidia support out of lmce.
By the way, that other company didn't hold "such extremely 'purist' views" either, but somehow burrying their heads in the sand just didn't work for them. Now clever people tend to learn from others' mistakes instead of making the same ones all over again. But hey suit yourself and just keep supporting next to useless abominations like closed source binary-only drivers.
