Daniel Burrows

writes “and the built-in graphics card (usually Intel) on the motherboard is just fine for that.”

I would agree with you, if I had an built-in graphics card with Intel.

That is in fact what I’m aiming for for my next laptop. But actually none of the PCs I have in my house has Intel graphics, unfortunately. Intel graphics is pretty much restricted to Core CPUs and Laptops. Which sucks.

I wish there would be more “budget” systems with Intel graphics. As you mentioned I don’t need high end graphics anyway. I actually don’t need high end CPU anyway (power consumption is more interesting, and the value/price ratio). I wish I could have bought a system with Intel graphics, but that would have been twice the price.

I wish we had some standard like VESA, just a bit more modern. Like having sane refresh rates for non-TFT screens and maybe some extra acceleration.

Oh, and I actually doubt that ATI would give away much secrets if it would allow distributing the existing opensource X drivers. It’s not as if the specs of their CPU would be a huge surprise to Nvidia. Some actually say nvidia builds the better graphics cards. And Intel does even give away source code. We’re not talking about chip design here, or driver optimizations. Just the plain registers and ports. heck, ATI, Nvidia and Intel could probably even agree on a standard here, except it would mean they’d need to change their drivers and hardware for the next generation with really no visible benefit to them (only to us, we could maybe run the basics with the same driver).