Following up on a couple of updates from yesterday, id Software's Brian Hook made another update to his .plan with a discussion of how id selects the independent hardware vendors they work with, going into the several factors involved. It's a lengthy post so I'll excerpt the summary (the whole update) also offers Brian's awards for 1998 for Best Clothing, Best Box that a Card Arrived In, and Best Misc Crap. Here's the excerpt:

So there are basically "chips we have to support", "chips we like to support", "chips that aren't terribly relevant but we'd like to support anyway", and "chips that we could give a damn about". Chips we HAVE to support include the Voodoo, Voodoo2, and Rage Pro because they are out there in HUGE numbers. Chips we like to support are NVidia RivaTNT and ATI Rage128. Chips that aren't terribly relevant but that we'd like to support well include Rendition V2x00, Savage S3, and Permedia2. And chips we could give a damn about are things like TriTech Pyramid3D, Virge, and Number Nine Ticket To Ride.

We can't comment on Permedia3 or Voodoo3 since we are not in possession of any of these devices. And for those of you still with PowerVR PCX2, you're probably out of luck since I don't believe NEC/VL/PowerVR are actively updating those drivers (although the hardware itself should work fine with our vertex lighting model).

On a somewhat related note, several Matrox G200 users have asked me about the support for that board. The G200 is a very good accelerator with good performance and great image quality, however they haven't gotten on the ball with the OpenGL thing. When they have a high quality, high performance OpenGL driver then I'll be able to recommend their hardware enthusiastically. Their reliance on the D3D wrapper for so long did not endear them to us.