Re: quake4 on debian amd64
On Tue, Jan 31, 2006 at 03:49:05PM +0000, A J Stiles wrote:
> You know, if hardware manufacturers were obliged by law to release sufficient
> information to enable a competent programmer to write a driver, we would not
> be in this sorry mess in the first place.
That is no excuse for making a mess of the system setup to support said
hardware when a better cleaner and accepted method exists.
> It's my assertion that nVidia's secrecy is a smokescreen to disguise something
> they do not want the general public knowing; and my guess that the "low end"
> cards could be converted to "high end" cards very simply by a person with the
> right knowledge. But just the sheer volume of data that gets sent to a
> graphics card makes reverse-engineering a daunting prospect.
In some cases that is true. In most it is not. transistors are not
free to put on a die, and the bigger the die the higher the chance of
errors. Low end cards have smaller chips that are much less likely to
not work when they make them, and they get more per waffer. They do
certainly in some cases test a high end chip, find a defect in a
pipeline or two, and turn off the broken pipelines and sell it as the
lower part (ie turn a 24 pipe chip into a 20 pipe chip). If it doesn't
run reliably at full clock speed, they test it at lower, and if it
works, turn off the extra hardware that the lower part shouldn't have
and ship it as such. This doesn't mean that a 4 pipeline part is the
same as a 24 pipeline part. That would be much to wasteful, and there
is a much bigger market for the low end parts than high end parts, so
they make a lot more of the low end parts.
Len Sorensen
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