It is possible to gain the specs for a chip by discetion for i.e R300 chip or NV 30 chips with the right tools like a electon microscope?

Mike A. Harris wrote:

On Sat, 31 Jan 2004, Ryan Underwood wrote:



 Excluding Nvidia and ATI, for which I believe I know the answer, what
manufacturers I am likely to see on ebay that:

1) Usually fully and freely publish the specifications of their AGP
hardware.
2) Got themselves an X driver?


In case you are lumping NVIDIA and ATI into the same category, you have
made a mistake. (In case not, ignore this post.)

ATI has been quite friendly with NDA docs for all but their latest
hardware, AFAIK. A Mach64 driver was even recently written based on
their help. We are lacking r300 documentation but maybe when their next
gen hardware shows up, they will be more open with it.



That's not entirely true... Some people do have /some/ of the R300 specs under NDA.




NVIDIA, on the other hand, released some obfuscated source code back in
1999 that the Utah GLX driver was based upon. After that point, they
eventually expressed dissatisfaction with the DRI architecture and have
never released an ounce of documentation or driver code since.



To be fair, that isn't entirely true either. The "nv" driver is currently maintained by Mark Vojkovich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> whom continues to maintain the "nv" driver on an ongoing basis. Much of that driver was rewritten for 4.4.0, or at least it appears so when doing a diff between 4.3.0 and 4.4.0 at least at first glance. While the driver is fairly cryptic to many eyes, it is none the less there, and maintained by Mark at Nvidia.


Of course that's not 3D code, and your statements above mostly concerned 3D related things, but I wanted to at least clarify this point for those who otherwise might not have been aware.







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