>> Not only is the hardware interface publicly documented, but the open source >> drivers are also provisioned right from the hardware vendor. >> >> Here's the hardware support matrix. http://intellinuxgraphics.org/user.html Now if the hardware and drivers didn't suck, things would be great. To clarify, they are probably fine for 2D. But for anything 3D... too expensive, too poor of performance. Also, probably lacking when it comes to watching high-quality videos. I've had bad experiences with ATIs drivers (on windows and linux) and have since only bought NVidia. Plus, NVidia supports VDPAU - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDPAU - which is awesome for my latest project - a mythtv box. Basically, offload all work of watching full 1080i HD video streams to the video card. You have to step all the way up to at least the Intel GMA X4500HD motherboard video chipset to even think about full HD... and even then, the performance of that chipset is laughable compared to the cheapest standalone videocards from ATI or NVidia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA And when I was researching the x4500HD under linux, all I ran into was loads of failure reports, because the intel driver is so poor at the moment. With the NVidia driver, everything just works beautifully. I can decode full HD, or h.264 encoded video with close to 0 CPU usage. Driver not "open"? eh. I don't care. I'd much rather have a closed driver that is actually supported and takes full advantage of the hardware, then an "open" driver that sucks. Dan