Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2004 23:41:43 +0100 From: Matthias Buelow <mkb@mukappabeta.de> To: Jorn Argelo <jorn@wcborstel.nl> Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: the best graphicscard for FreeBSD Message-ID: <41A65FA7.2080704@mukappabeta.de> In-Reply-To: <20041125221914.M81723@wcborstel.nl> References: <51611.192.168.0.200.1101398532.squirrel@192.168.0.200> <200411251706.22229.mark@markdnet.demon.co.uk> <1101405168.99948.43.camel@zircon.zircon.seattle.wa.us> <200411251807.47294.mark@markdnet.demon.co.uk> <20041125194327.C5321@bigtower.net> <1101411381.568.1.camel@grass.dyndns.org> <1101411674.99948.51.camel@zircon.zircon.seattle.wa.us> <86u0rdr9l0.fsf@srvbsdnanssv.interne.kisoft-services.com> <1101412864.568.7.camel@grass.dyndns.org> <41A63AE3.9020008@mukappabeta.de> <20041125221914.M81723@wcborstel.nl>
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Jorn Argelo wrote:
> It's simple why they don't make it open source. Making it open source makes it
> easier for ATi to steal their ideas and they can figure out construction of
> their GPUs (think of bugs or flaws in the driver or the architecture).
I wonder what "secrets" that might be? After all, a big competitor
might, in theory, have no problems of taking a disassembler or
decompiler and just take apart the binary driver (if they need to do
that at all).
Another question is, how much of these ideas today is in the driver, and
how much in silicon. I'd think that nVidia and ATI employ pretty much
the same techniques for their chips and only the IC designs differ a bit
(but are probably well-known to the competitor). With the drivers
getting bigger and bigger (the ATI Catalyst graphics driver component
alone is over 8 megs), maybe a lot of the logics is actually in the
proprietary driver code?
In that case, they could provide a rather basic open-source driver,
which implements standard OpenGL stuff, and leave the high-profile
extensions to their proprietary driver. Or make the basic API for their
chip available. But then again, why should they, it simply won't pay
off with the tiny margin that *bsd/linux users are, and 2d support is
usually available.
--
Matthias Buelow; mkb@{mukappabeta,informatik.uni-wuerzburg}.de
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