[dsio]

I was just speaking to few knowledgable people about this, and they raised an interesting point. At present, Nvidia supports SLI on Nvidia chipsets, but does NOT support SLI on intel or AMD chipsets.

Now a current Intel X38 platform has 2 PCI-E 16X slots, and technically there is no reason why it can't support SLI, in fact driver hacks have sometimes allowed SLI to work on AMD/intel platforms.

If Nvidia releases the specs and opens up their drivers, an open source driver could potentially allow for SLI on all platforms and potentially different configurations.

This would mean there would be less reason for people to buy Nvidia chipsets. There are other things, possible, but not enabled by default in the driver, for example, transparency antialiasing was originally touted as a tech unique to the Geforce 7 series. In reality it was just a driver tweak, and when they reused NV4x cores in the 7 series, new drivers allowed transparency antialiasing to work on the whole Geforce 6 series. I have no doubt they're still doing it.

Closed source drivers give them that power and control over us. They don't want to lose it.