[cairo] glitz and shader programs

[Jon Smirl]

ATI gets a  B for open source support. We have 90% of the doc for the NV200
hardware. We are missing doc for hyper-Z and the shader hardware. ATI has not
released any doc for the NV300 line so if you are using recent hardware there
are no open source 3D drivers for it. The 2D ones works because 2D is the same
on all of the chips. They have released docs for Rage, Rage128, R100.

Nvidia gets an F. They have released no documentation. All drivers you see are
reverse engineered. I gave away my Nvidia hardware bought ATI.

Martox gets a B. No Parhelia docs.

Intel and others get an A. Most have released full documentation but their chips
aren't as good. 


--- Andrew Johnson <acjgenius at earthlink.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-04-27 at 04:38, Vladimir Vukicevic wrote:
> > Going forward, I don't really see any of the major players (read: nvidia 
> > and ATI) becoming any more "open source" friendly, as far as hardware 
> > documentation goes -- we'll probably be stuck with proprietary drivers 
> > for some time now, fairly good ones in nvidia's case, and horrid ones in 
> > ATI's case.
> 
> I know its a side track to the general conversation, but, to try and
> stop this myth again... ATI is VERY open  source friendly. In fact a
> good majority of the X ati driver was written by someone at ATI(who
> presumably has full documentation), and they have given full
> documentation to the gatos people for new cards as recent as the 9700.
> The proprietary drivers were only released for the general consumer
> cards at the communities request, they have never intended to fully
> support it, and cannot open source it because of third party components
> internally. 
> 
> With the gatos drivers the ATI cards are already fairly well supported.
> If you want better acceleration for something, consider talking to those
> who have a good understanding of the cards and have a fair bit of the
> documentation, the gatos people. If something such as the shader
> implementations are not open source and none exist, it probably means
> ATI and gatos don't consider it a priority, or perhaps the source in the
> proprietary drivers depends on 3rd party extensions and would require
> too much effort to try and port.
> 
> Andrew
> 
> 
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=====
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl at yahoo.com


	
		
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