Re: HARDWARE: Open-Source-Friendly Graphics Cards -- Viable?

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 22 October 2004 13:15, Stephen Lewis wrote:
>Timothy Miller wrote:
>> The reason this idea came up is because I, as a user of Linux, am
>> often frustrated by the lack of open-source support for graphics
>> cards which are not "pre-owned".  Sure, SOME companies release
>> specs so that we can develop open source drivers, but those cards
>> tend to be prohibitively expensive, slower than their cheaper
>> counterparts from ATI or nVidia, and they STILL don't document the
>> internals of the BIOS so that the card can be ported to a non-x86
>> system.
>
>What has this to do with the kernel? More relevant on X server,
> OpenGL or GPGPU lists?
>
>Baseline - I can get accelerated 3D graphics and video overlay
>and YV12 and VGA registers with open source driver that compiles
>for PowerPC and DEC Alpha today for $85 - Radeon 7500 PCI.

'scuse me, but have you tried to buy one of those locally?  The 
unwashed masses of us are stuck with whatever we can buy at Circuit 
City et all, and the cheapest thing today for an AGP slot is the 
house brands of the 9200 SE w/128 megs of ddr ram.

>X.org 'ati' driver at http://x.org
>http://freedesktop.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xf
>ree86/drivers/ati/?root=xorg If you can improve on that then I will
> buy one for each of my Alpha and PowerPC systems.

Has this links code been substantially updated since the 6.8.1 release 
as built on an x86 system?  If not, then this common readily 
available card is still not supported all that well, my lspci outputs 
say the vendor codes are unknown.  And my glxgears is 198 fps.

>
>http://www.gpgpu.org/ are programming multivendor graphics cards for
>general purpose computing BUT the toolchain involves a proprietary
>compiler which is single platform.
>What good is a card with open source hardware and open source
>driver that is programmable BUT the toolchain is proprietary?
>
>Stephen Lewis
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-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
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