An anonymous reader writes "Ending off the X Developer Summit this year, Matthew Tippett handed off ATI's GPU specifications to David Airlie on a CD. However, the specifications are also now available on the X.org site. Right now there is the RV630 Register Reference Guide and M56 Register Reference Guide. Expect more documentation (and 3D specifications) to arrive shortly. The new open-source R500/600 driver will be released early next week."
Actually this is the fun part. Governments have been "enforcing" open source as gimmicks. The only way to show there is a REAL market is to have an actual producer get involved and actually PROVIDE the goods and support. Red Hat did its part, various OSS groups did their part, etc. They weren't tax supported, but they did a better job than all the tax supported wealth consuming agencies out there:)
I agree, once the cards hit my neck of the woods, if they're well implemented in hardware, I'll gladly suppl
Actually there's a good number of modern AMD D3D10 products available on AGP now, and the older R5-series hardware had good AGP presence as well. Not the high-end R600 I should say, but RV630 and RV610 (HD 2600 and HD 2400) are both available. And the Windows Vista driver sucks, somewhat hilariously.
And the Windows Vista driver sucks, somewhat hilariously.
It wasn't too long ago that I was at Microsoft's Philadelphia offices for an Exchange 2007 presentation. The first thing that they wanted to show was a short video on a projection screen -- what they actually showed the audience was a Vista laptop with ATI graphics choking half way through a two-minute video and then puking an error message saying that the video driver crashed and was being restarted. And some guy behind me said "Twelve years later and they still can't get the presentation right."
I would say the message would come across better if you send it to nVidia. The big effect will be if every Linux OEM started shipping Radeon in every box, that could be a pretty big number of lost potential sales that they weren't considered for solely based on software.
This could really be huge in the progress towards making Linux mainstream. The last few times I've installed Linux, installing my 3D drive for nVidia has required a few steps most users wouldn't or couldn't do. Several distros won't automat
Better idea: instead of popping up a dialog asking to install 3D acceleration, the installer just does it. After all, it'll be free software.
An even better idea: since a Free driver can be included in the kernel source and compiled into a module, the installer doesn't have to do anything special to enable 3D acceleration. It just installs all available kernel modules as normal and the kernel figures it out at bootup time and loads the ATI driver if appropriate.
by Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday September 12 2007, @05:21PM (#20580147)
The big effect will be if every Linux OEM started shipping Radeon in every box, that could be a pretty big number of lost potential sales that they weren't considered for solely based on software.
"They've actually done it. It's time to buy an ATI card."
I've been recommending nVidia cards to everyone who asks, simply because their Linux support has been leagues ahead of ATI (now AMD, for those who haven't been paying attention). If the specs are credible enough to create a quality Free driver, then I'll switch to AMD in a heart beat.
I've been recommending nVidia cards to everyone who asks, simply because their Linux support has been leagues ahead of ATI (now AMD, for those who haven't been paying attention).
True, true. My girlfriend got a laptop a couple weeks ago and one of the deciding factors was nVidia vs ATI. I haven't even considered an ATI card for myself and I recommend that others get nVidia.
It's about fucking time that companies realize the trickle-down effect of abusing nerds. Who do the ignorant masses go to when they need advice? Their nerdy friend...
ATI lost market share for almost the exact reason that IE did (albeit to less extent).
The issue with a closed driver for the nVidia cards that actually performs somewhat well is actually a detriment for the community at large. It causes some people who would be interested in making a better open driver to just suck it up and use the existing closed driver because it's easier even though it has many problems.
I am very thankful that AMD has released specs. Until nVidia follows suit there should be no real reason to buy nVidia cards. This means that they will be forced to eventually release specs and those of us who had no support from nVidia will finally get a working driver.
As an nVidia customer, all I can say is Thank You AMD!
If the specs are credible enough to create a quality Free driver, then I'll switch to AMD in a heart beat.
Yes, me too. I was actually planning to do an upgrade of my box in a little while, for the first time in many years now, and I was sure that I was going to get an nVidia card, but this might turn that decision around completely.
However, I have to wonder -- I really have no idea about ATI GPU parts, but the impression I got is that they are releasing the specs for the new top-of-the-line units, and since I don't even play games, I'm not interested in such things. What I'm interested in is having dual-display, TV output, 2D acceleration and XV working on the budget cards (and without making VGA BIOS calls, thank you very much), but I have yet to hear whether these released specifications will cover enough to create a truly free, fully featured driver for the budget model GPUs.
Also, apart from budget models, how will these specifications apply to older cards? I still have a Radeon 7500 lying in a drawer doing nothing just because I never got the TV output working on it in Linux. As a side story on that one, I even engaged in communications with ATI to try and get some specifications on that card in order to enhance the X driver with TV output support, but even when I managed to get my hands on documentation, it conspicuously excluded any information on the registers controlling the TV output encoder (even though I had explicitly requested that information...). That's when I resigned myself and bought a GeForce 5200 instead.
Is it really though? That's not rhetorical. Without RTFAing, I want the slashdot opinion - is this or is this not the proof that ATI is the solution for linux graphics? I was almost certain that my next card would be an nvidia, but this may change that.
Is it really though? That's not rhetorical. Without RTFAing, I want the slashdot opinion - is this or is this not the proof that ATI is the solution for linux graphics? I was almost certain that my next card would be an nvidia, but this may change that.
It will be, in a few weeks. Moreso in a few months as the drivers improve. Performance tuning is one of the open source methodology's strengths.
ATI have historically always had excellent features on their cards for supporting media playback. The downside was that accessing them in Linux has always been much harder than using the equivalent features on nvidia hardware.
If these specs allow a good stable XVMC driver to be written for ATI hardware, ATI could become the top choice for Linux media centre boxes.
They've released the specs, this doesn't mean anything yet. People forget just how complex graphics cards are. Writing a driver for something like a network card or SCSI controller is fairly easy, and that's also evident from how small the drivers are. There's just little to do. 3D cards are extremely complex, hence the massive amount of documentation. It isn't like there was just some magic number that needed releasing and the OSS drivers would be perfect with full support. There's now a ton of work to be done, since it sounds like it is just specs, not code, they are releasing.
So you'll probably want to wait and watch until the driver is ready to go and up to whatever performance and stability standards you need for your application. Switch now and you are likely to find yourself in essentially the same situation as before: ATi's binary driver, or an OSS driver that doesn't do what you want.
It'll be some time before this information can be transformed in to a fully functional, stable, fast driver. After all, if it were so easy, ATi and nVidia would have perfect drivers out on the launch of a new card and never need to do anything but minor updates.
"Expect more documentation (and 3D specifications) to arrive shortly."
In short, we have 2D documentation but no 3D documentation. It's been this way for years, nothing is different.
The last time someone (Matrox) said "3D specifications to arrive shortly", a whole bunch of suckers (including myself) bought cards and got shafted because the promised specifications were never released. My G200 was replaced by a Riva TNT2 within six months and I haven't left NVidia since then.
Others promise open specifications and fail to release them fully, resulting in cards that are paperweights.
NVidia doesn't promise open specifications, but at least they deliver solid drivers that work (and work well).
Closed-source drivers can be OK, except they tend to discontinue support after a while. Eventually the binary driver won't load into a current kernel and you are high and dry. With open-source drivers, the prospects for long-term support are better.
Considering the issues I've had with closed source drivers over the years, I just can't EVER agree with them being OK. Closed source drivers have had all sorts of issues with not only kernel changes, but distro versions, architecture (64bit), xfree86 vs x.org, have issues with redistribution rights, etc. Furthermore, BSD / vs linux vs Solaris. No, IMHO closed source drivers just suck in all cases. We need the specs. Specs for all hardware would allow us to have working scanners, webcams, wifi adapters, etc.
OMG, you mean you can't run the same computer equipment for 20 years and expect it to before useful work in a modern fashion?
Your reading comprehension is worse than your grammar. By 20, you mean 5. It still "[something] useful work in a modern fashion", except that it's been artificially crippled by recent driver updates.
Probably just because they want money. Let's burn them.
Child, meet Market. Customers don't want to spend more money than they have to. Paradoxically, this often means they'll spend even more money with the companies that don't put the squeeze on them.
You all should be grateful instead of pissing in their Cheerios.
"Thank you, oh benevolent masters, for supplying the software required to use the hardware that you gave me in exchange for money." Was that suitably deferential, or should I bend my knee more?
Heh - I think you're missing the implication of his statement.
Because Linux is less resource intensive, he's able to upgrade his distro several times on the same hardware, putting himself in the situation of having a new kernel with old hardware and old drivers that don't load in the new kernel.
If you want to upgrade Windows, you usually wind up needing a new machine, so: new machine, new video card, new drivers, new Windows -- not a problem. Well, at least not the same problem.
So it's not an issue of what's *wrong* with Linux, it's what's *right* with it. The problem is that this presents circumstances the hardware world isn't used to dealing with.
AMD ie recently making more moves toward the open source community than either it or ATI did prior to the merger.It seems to me that AMD has realized that there is value in not only having the right products rolling off the lines, but also having a greater mindshare.
Google realized this early, and bought off a great amount of geek awe by using Linux as the basis for its computing grid. This popularity among geeks turned into word of mouth advertising which turned into huge market share (having a great product didn't hurt either). Google still tries to maintain the "we're just a benign bunch of geeks" image (an image which is eroding, as it becomes more apparent that they are more akin to a lovechild of M$ and the NSA than a giant sushi eating LAN party). This appeal to mindshare by making steps toward the community, genuine or not, may be part of what AMD is trying to do, at least to an extent.
There are other genuine benefits to being more open about its specs, most clearly highlighted by the use of ATI GPUs to process Folding@Home. Therefore it is conceivable that AMD GPUs and GPU/CPU combo chips in the future may, if more openly specced, be used in a wider variety of HPC applications.
Linux kind of carried the Opteron for the first year or so, since it had 64-bit and NUMA support, while M$ obligingly waited to release any such thing until Intel had an offering as well. Maybe AMD learned something from that.
I think AMD said almost as much when they announced that they'd be releasing specs and open drivers for these GPUs. The next step in processor development will be to combine the CPU and GPU on the same chip, and AMD wants to be sure that Linux and other OSS is there to support it.
That's great, except x64-native versions of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP were not released until 2005. Until then, Windows Server 2003 was available only in 32-bit x86 and Itanium-compatible flavours. Grandparent's observation is quite astute.
AMD ie recently making more moves toward the open source community than either it or ATI did prior to the merger.It seems to me that AMD has realized that there is value in not only having the right products rolling off the lines, but also having a greater mindshare.
AMD has actually been making moves for a long time so this isn't as large a step for them. Even before the amd64 cpus came out AMD had specs available and a machine simulator as well as several kernel developers working on getting Linux to run on their hardware.
On the other hand this is a huge step for ATI and I may very well find myself reconsidering my ATI boycott.
Given that Google's initial search technolgy seems to have come out of nowhere and that Google had secretive high government clearance contacts from day one, I think the more likely scenario is the NSA rolling up to Larry and Sergi and saying "we need public sector lovable geek mascots to hide behind while we monitor the population's activities. You two seem suitable and have the right profiles. Here's some search tech, and we'll set you up with the right venture capital connections [sequoiacap.com]. No go profile everybody
I think the more likely scenario is the NSA rolling up to Larry and Sergi and saying "we need public sector lovable geek mascots to hide behind while we monitor the population's activities. You two seem suitable and have the right profiles. Here's some search tech, and we'll set you up with the right venture capital connections. No go profile everybody."
This conspiracy theory seems incomplete. Did Jimmy Hoffa steal the search technology from Area 51's crashed Roswell UFO, and masqueraded as JFK when FSF supporters attempted to assassinate him for creating the possibility of a faked Apollo moon landing, then went into hiding for many years as Lord Lucan, fathered Princess Diana's unborn child, found Elvis and Marilyn Monroe alive and well in Atlantis, flew an Aurora spy-plane powered by water-fuelled engines through the hole in the North Pole into an unknown hollow Earth down to the South Pole, took this fabled Google search technology to the secret Illuminati base in Antarctica before heading north again, annoyed the Pope and Opus Dei and the long-lost descendants of Jesus Christ and finally became integrated into the Project for a New American Century's headquarters, the NSA - which was almost obliterated when the international Zionist conspiracy felled the Twin Towers with explosives and thermite in the fraudulent September the 11th attacks?
To be honest, you're not trying very hard. Or giving the real-world NSA lots of credit and assuming no end of competence on their behalf. They've cracked every form of encryption as well, right?
One can hope that it actually had the specifications for modern GPUs... and not just stuff you might find in scrap piles or in 15+ year old government computers. Otherwise, it will be like when the RIAA gave a crap-ton of Whitney Houston Christmas CDs as a settlement for their price-fixing practices... technically within the letter of the law, but violating the spirit of the law all to hell...
it will be like when the RIAA gave a crap-ton of Whitney Houston Christmas CDs as a settlement for their price-fixing practices... technically within the letter of the law, but violating the spirit of the law all to hell...
The specs are for the brand-spanking-new RV630 series, the mid to low range chip in the r600 line. And the specs are only for 2d modesetting at the moment, so they likely apply to the whole r600 series. When the 3d specs are released they'll likely be a separate spec sheet for each specific chip. So to answer your question, they are for the newest cards ATi currently makes not their old, outmoded ones.
Specs for r500(the X1k series) are supposedly in the pipleline. For matching codenames->marketing names, I recommend http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ATI_Graphics_Processing_Units [wikipedia.org]
And the reason why they are so "deficient" is they have a team of a few engineers helping the X.org folks write the drivers. They have also said that they will be providing code snippets in the future to help clear up unclear parts of the spec. This is just a teaser release, not all we're getting.
Well, if I can't get specs, my next video card will be an nVidia. Why should I suffer because my HW vendor wants to hide something from me? Do they really believe that non-functional hardware gains them any marketshare?
Now how does this make a lick of sense? nVidia haven't released ANY specs.
Also, I'd imagine that 2d rendering is reasonably similar across chipsets, but I admit I'm just guessing there.
The RV630 chip is anything but "old", and what runs the Radeon HD 2600 PRO and Radeon HD 2600 XT. These belong to the very latest Radeon R600 line [wikipedia.org] -- AMD's Direct3D 10 / Shader Model 4.0 supporting GPU's. These are high end chips from 2007, currently only beat by the Radeon HD 2900 XT in performance, if only speaking of AMD/ATI. The M56 chip is the core of the ATI Radeon Mobility X1600 (released December 2005), which is still a very decent mobile chip, roughly corresponding to an NVIDIA Geforce Go 7600 in performance.
Hmm, I now also see the ATI FireGL V7600 runs the RV630 too. Maybe that could work out for something too...
This is amazing news, not only that the specifications have finally been opened, but that the open source community has immediately utilized them to update the driver with a turn around time of only 2 weeks.
I guess we can thank Dell for pressuring ATI for better Linux support.
Actually, (IIRC) the driver has been sitting in somebody's desk drawer for months, waiting for AMDTI to bless it. The developer got the specs under NDA or something quite a while ago.
Read David's blog - http://airlied.livejournal.com/ [livejournal.com] - there are a whole pile of potential problems about that driver. David accepts that it was on questionable ground, and so it will probably never see the light of day.
I wonder if this has more to do with trying to get mind and market share over intel than them really beleiving Open Source is the future of the market. maybe it's both.
I will take that bet. Shall we say a six-pack of winner's choice of beer?
NVidia have been stalwart protectors of their hardware designs, mostly due to historical accident. A few of the principals at NVidia used to work at Sun, where they designed the GX graphics chip. As it turns out, a version of SunOS was released with a header file describing the chip's registers. Using that -- and a logic analyzer -- a company called Weitek successfully created a functional clone of the chip that was good enough such that Sun's own drivers worked on it. This stuck in the craw of the Sun guys, and evidently vowed no such thing would happen again.
Another historical accident was that NVidia did, in fact, have a few source code releases way back. And every time they did, so it seemed, they got hit a few weeks later with a patent infringement lawsuit, usually from SGI. NVidia solved this latter problem largely through the expedient of buying SGI.
So, no, I don't think they're going to do it, and certainly not within six months. And yes, I would be perfectly tickled to be wrong about that.
Its (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's It's, not Its (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
I'll replace my nVidia when I see a good review. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll do my part and replace my AGP nVidia card with an ATI one as soon as there is a good review of an available card with this driver on Ubuntu.
Re:I'll replace my nVidia when I see a good review (Score:3, Interesting)
They weren't tax supported, but they did a better job than all the tax supported wealth consuming agencies out there
I agree, once the cards hit my neck of the woods, if they're well implemented in hardware, I'll gladly suppl
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'll replace my nVidia when I see a good review (Score:5, Funny)
And the Windows Vista driver sucks, somewhat hilariously.
It wasn't too long ago that I was at Microsoft's Philadelphia offices for an Exchange 2007 presentation. The first thing that they wanted to show was a short video on a projection screen -- what they actually showed the audience was a Vista laptop with ATI graphics choking half way through a two-minute video and then puking an error message saying that the video driver crashed and was being restarted. And some guy behind me said "Twelve years later and they still can't get the presentation right."
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The big effect will be if every Linux OEM started shipping Radeon in every box, that could be a pretty big number of lost potential sales that they weren't considered for solely based on software.
This could really be huge in the progress towards making Linux mainstream. The last few times I've installed Linux, installing my 3D drive for nVidia has required a few steps most users wouldn't or couldn't do. Several distros won't automat
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You may be right ... (Score:4, Insightful)
An even better idea: since a Free driver can be included in the kernel source and compiled into a module, the installer doesn't have to do anything special to enable 3D acceleration. It just installs all available kernel modules as normal and the kernel figures it out at bootup time and loads the ATI driver if appropriate.
Parent
Re:You may be right ... (Score:4, Funny)
Where's the -1 delusional mod?
Parent
Sound interesting... (Score:5, Funny)
Great (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been recommending nVidia cards to everyone who asks, simply because their Linux support has been leagues ahead of ATI (now AMD, for those who haven't been paying attention). If the specs are credible enough to create a quality Free driver, then I'll switch to AMD in a heart beat.
Parent
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
It's about fucking time that companies realize the trickle-down effect of abusing nerds. Who do the ignorant masses go to when they need advice? Their nerdy friend...
ATI lost market share for almost the exact reason that IE did (albeit to less extent).
Parent
Re: closed nVidia support actually bad (Score:4, Insightful)
I am very thankful that AMD has released specs. Until nVidia follows suit there should be no real reason to buy nVidia cards. This means that they will be forced to eventually release specs and those of us who had no support from nVidia will finally get a working driver.
As an nVidia customer, all I can say is Thank You AMD!
Parent
Re:Great (Score:4, Insightful)
However, I have to wonder -- I really have no idea about ATI GPU parts, but the impression I got is that they are releasing the specs for the new top-of-the-line units, and since I don't even play games, I'm not interested in such things. What I'm interested in is having dual-display, TV output, 2D acceleration and XV working on the budget cards (and without making VGA BIOS calls, thank you very much), but I have yet to hear whether these released specifications will cover enough to create a truly free, fully featured driver for the budget model GPUs.
Also, apart from budget models, how will these specifications apply to older cards? I still have a Radeon 7500 lying in a drawer doing nothing just because I never got the TV output working on it in Linux. As a side story on that one, I even engaged in communications with ATI to try and get some specifications on that card in order to enhance the X driver with TV output support, but even when I managed to get my hands on documentation, it conspicuously excluded any information on the registers controlling the TV output encoder (even though I had explicitly requested that information...). That's when I resigned myself and bought a GeForce 5200 instead.
Parent
Re:Great (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Great (Score:4, Interesting)
is this or is this not the proof that ATI is the solution for linux graphics?
For those of us who absolutely refuse to use closed sourced drivers their older cards have already proven to be the best solution for desktops.
Parent
Re:Great (Score:4, Insightful)
It will be, in a few weeks. Moreso in a few months as the drivers improve. Performance tuning is one of the open source methodology's strengths.
Parent
May be best for HTPC (Score:4, Interesting)
If these specs allow a good stable XVMC driver to be written for ATI hardware, ATI could become the top choice for Linux media centre boxes.
Parent
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Well hold on there (Score:5, Insightful)
So you'll probably want to wait and watch until the driver is ready to go and up to whatever performance and stability standards you need for your application. Switch now and you are likely to find yourself in essentially the same situation as before: ATi's binary driver, or an OSS driver that doesn't do what you want.
It'll be some time before this information can be transformed in to a fully functional, stable, fast driver. After all, if it were so easy, ATi and nVidia would have perfect drivers out on the launch of a new card and never need to do anything but minor updates.
Parent
No they haven't (Score:4, Insightful)
In short, we have 2D documentation but no 3D documentation. It's been this way for years, nothing is different.
The last time someone (Matrox) said "3D specifications to arrive shortly", a whole bunch of suckers (including myself) bought cards and got shafted because the promised specifications were never released. My G200 was replaced by a Riva TNT2 within six months and I haven't left NVidia since then.
Others promise open specifications and fail to release them fully, resulting in cards that are paperweights.
NVidia doesn't promise open specifications, but at least they deliver solid drivers that work (and work well).
Parent
Sweet! (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Furthermore, BSD / vs linux vs Solaris. No, IMHO closed source drivers just suck in all cases. We need the specs. Specs for all hardware would allow us to have working scanners, webcams, wifi adapters, etc.
Re:Sweet! (Score:5, Insightful)
Your reading comprehension is worse than your grammar. By 20, you mean 5. It still "[something] useful work in a modern fashion", except that it's been artificially crippled by recent driver updates.
Child, meet Market. Customers don't want to spend more money than they have to. Paradoxically, this often means they'll spend even more money with the companies that don't put the squeeze on them.
Parent
Re:Sweet! Sour!! (Score:5, Insightful)
For the record, Nvidia says otherwise [nvidia.com].
"Thank you, oh benevolent masters, for supplying the software required to use the hardware that you gave me in exchange for money." Was that suitably deferential, or should I bend my knee more?
Parent
Actually (Score:5, Insightful)
Because Linux is less resource intensive, he's able to upgrade his distro several times on the same hardware, putting himself in the situation of having a new kernel with old hardware and old drivers that don't load in the new kernel.
If you want to upgrade Windows, you usually wind up needing a new machine, so: new machine, new video card, new drivers, new Windows -- not a problem. Well, at least not the same problem.
So it's not an issue of what's *wrong* with Linux, it's what's *right* with it. The problem is that this presents circumstances the hardware world isn't used to dealing with.
Parent
It seems to me... (Score:5, Interesting)
Google realized this early, and bought off a great amount of geek awe by using Linux as the basis for its computing grid. This popularity among geeks turned into word of mouth advertising which turned into huge market share (having a great product didn't hurt either). Google still tries to maintain the "we're just a benign bunch of geeks" image (an image which is eroding, as it becomes more apparent that they are more akin to a lovechild of M$ and the NSA than a giant sushi eating LAN party). This appeal to mindshare by making steps toward the community, genuine or not, may be part of what AMD is trying to do, at least to an extent.
There are other genuine benefits to being more open about its specs, most clearly highlighted by the use of ATI GPUs to process Folding@Home. Therefore it is conceivable that AMD GPUs and GPU/CPU combo chips in the future may, if more openly specced, be used in a wider variety of HPC applications.
Disclaimer: I am an AMD fanboi.
Re:It seems to me... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:It seems to me... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:It seems to me... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:It seems to me... (Score:5, Interesting)
AMD ie recently making more moves toward the open source community than either it or ATI did prior to the merger.It seems to me that AMD has realized that there is value in not only having the right products rolling off the lines, but also having a greater mindshare.
AMD has actually been making moves for a long time so this isn't as large a step for them. Even before the amd64 cpus came out AMD had specs available and a machine simulator as well as several kernel developers working on getting Linux to run on their hardware.
On the other hand this is a huge step for ATI and I may very well find myself reconsidering my ATI boycott.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:It seems to me... (Score:5, Funny)
This conspiracy theory seems incomplete. Did Jimmy Hoffa steal the search technology from Area 51's crashed Roswell UFO, and masqueraded as JFK when FSF supporters attempted to assassinate him for creating the possibility of a faked Apollo moon landing, then went into hiding for many years as Lord Lucan, fathered Princess Diana's unborn child, found Elvis and Marilyn Monroe alive and well in Atlantis, flew an Aurora spy-plane powered by water-fuelled engines through the hole in the North Pole into an unknown hollow Earth down to the South Pole, took this fabled Google search technology to the secret Illuminati base in Antarctica before heading north again, annoyed the Pope and Opus Dei and the long-lost descendants of Jesus Christ and finally became integrated into the Project for a New American Century's headquarters, the NSA - which was almost obliterated when the international Zionist conspiracy felled the Twin Towers with explosives and thermite in the fraudulent September the 11th attacks?
To be honest, you're not trying very hard. Or giving the real-world NSA lots of credit and assuming no end of competence on their behalf. They've cracked every form of encryption as well, right?
Parent
Hopefully a meaningful contribution (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hopefully a meaningful contribution (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Yes, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Teaser indeed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now how does this make a lick of sense? nVidia haven't released ANY specs.
Also, I'd imagine that 2d rendering is reasonably similar across chipsets, but I admit I'm just guessing there.
Parent
Re:Hopefully a meaningful contribution (Score:5, Informative)
Hmm, I now also see the ATI FireGL V7600 runs the RV630 too. Maybe that could work out for something too...
Parent
Nice, but... (Score:5, Funny)
Just imagine an SLI'd Beowulf cluster of these!
np: Masha Qrella - Insecure (Luck)
Wow! (Score:4, Funny)
I guess we can thank Dell for pressuring ATI for better Linux support.
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Informative)
Read David's blog - http://airlied.livejournal.com/ [livejournal.com] - there are a whole pile of potential problems about that driver. David accepts that it was on questionable ground, and so it will probably never see the light of day.
Parent
Hmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Nice bit of good news anyway.
900 pages? (Score:5, Funny)
Come off it... that's not even enough for an Office document standard.
Worthless!
Amazing, we're saved! (Score:3, Funny)
Hurray, now all Linux graphics problems are solved, it will autodetect all graphics cards like Windows 1.0 did and penguins will dance in the streets.
So, which cards does this cover? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Within (Score:5, Interesting)
NVidia have been stalwart protectors of their hardware designs, mostly due to historical accident. A few of the principals at NVidia used to work at Sun, where they designed the GX graphics chip. As it turns out, a version of SunOS was released with a header file describing the chip's registers. Using that -- and a logic analyzer -- a company called Weitek successfully created a functional clone of the chip that was good enough such that Sun's own drivers worked on it. This stuck in the craw of the Sun guys, and evidently vowed no such thing would happen again.
Another historical accident was that NVidia did, in fact, have a few source code releases way back. And every time they did, so it seemed, they got hit a few weeks later with a patent infringement lawsuit, usually from SGI. NVidia solved this latter problem largely through the expedient of buying SGI.
So, no, I don't think they're going to do it, and certainly not within six months. And yes, I would be perfectly tickled to be wrong about that.
Schwab
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