This is a fairly big story for the open source world – Intel have released driver source code for their Intel 965 Express range of graphics cards. Most of these cards are used for ‘integrated graphics’ – that is, they are built straight into the motherboard and aren’t designed for gaming/heavy 3D work. Intel actually are leaders in the graphics chip market, but that’s generally for these integrated graphics solutions where 3D processing horsepower isn’t required.

Nevertheless, Intel have released and open sourced both 2D and 3D drivers for these cards and Linux users with these cards should be able to set up 3D accelaration support very easily – due to the fact that Linux distributors are free to include the drivers in the distribution.

To get 3D accelaration support for other cards in Linux is not very easy at all at the moment. Both ATi and Nvidia offer 3D drivers for Linux, but they are not open source. This means the main distributions generally aren’t free to include the drivers on the disc, so the user has to download and manually install the drivers (which in most cases involves using the command line for a short while). Also, 3D drivers for Linux aren’t as fully tested and sometimes cause problems which aren’t easy for community members to help with.

Needless to say, this is a big and very brave move by Intel which will hopefully be mirrored by the other big graphics players.

However, I’m sceptical that Nvidia and ATi will follow suit. Driver software, by its nature, reveals a lot of information about how hardware works, so ATi and Nvidia won’t want to share potentially secret hardware specifications with each other. With Intel not having quite as much of a stake in the high-end graphics market, they apparently don’t see the big players as such a big threat.

You can download the driver source code from the site here (but if you want to use the driver it’s probably easier to wait for your distribution to package it for you).