Graphics chip maker ATI Technologies Inc hopes to gain a foothold in the nascent Linux gaming community with its release of 2D, 3D and multimedia programming specifications for its RAGE graphics technologies. This will allow open source developers like the Xfree86 Project to develop 3D drivers for Linux PCs.
The Canadian company expects the Linux PC games market to take off over the next six to eight months and wants to be in on the ground floor. Currently, Quake 3 is being ported to Linux and ATI says that it knows of many more Linux games in development, using the OpenGL 3D application programming interface. Linux drivers will also help when developers come to porting games from the Sony Playstation 2 to the desktop because the Sony box uses a Linux development environment.
