Re: If ATI and nVidia don't support their own products, who does?
On Mon, 04 Oct 2004 12:56:57 -0400, Roberto Sanchez
<rcsanchez97@yahoo.es> wrote:
>
>
> Wim De Smet wrote:
> > On Sun, 03 Oct 2004 19:32:37 -0700, Paul Johnson
> > <baloo@ursine.dyndns.org> wrote:
> >
> >><#secure method=pgp mode=sign>
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> >>Wim De Smet <kromagg@gmail.com> writes:
> >>
> >>
> >>>You're looking at it wrong. Nobody really wants them to open source
> >>>their driver. Okay maybe because it's easier. But people really want
> >>>to be able to write their own driver.
> >>
> >>And they can still do that, nobody's stopping them. All we (at least
> >>RMS and Iare in the same boat, and likely thousands of others) ask is
> >>that we get those drivers under a license that meets the DFSG and
> >>doesn't make us run through tons of extra hoops and user-hostile
> >>licensing.
> >
> >
> > I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. The whole reason that
> > there are no free drivers is that it is enormously difficult to
> > reverse engineer a display driver. 2D might very well be doable but it
> > takes some effort and you will probably never get the same speed a
> > nvidia engineer could (since he knows what is in the hardware).
> > Getting 3D to work (and work fast) is even harder and the same
> > restrictions apply. All we should ask is the information we need about
> > the hardware. But nVidia is afraid that this might give too much of an
> > insight into their techniques to ATI, and vice versa. There is a core
> > of truth in that.
> >
>
> Then ATI must employ some extremely crappy engineers. I get better
> 3D performance using the open source DRI drivers (which, IIRC, were
> written with no assisance from ATI) for every 3D app, except games
> that make use of S3 Texture Compression.
>
> I know the open source nVidia drivers don't come close to the
> performance of the propritary drivers, but what is ATI's excuse?
Actually, for the older drivers ATI had this special program where
people could write open source drivers for their cards after signing
an NDA. The overall crappiness is due to the fact that 1) ATI doesn't
invest much resources in linux development and 2) they can't tie into
the kernel so tightly as the DRI folks can (because of licensing
problems). Although that's just a guess
greets,
Wim
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