On Fri, Feb 20, 2004 at 07:55:27AM -0800, Ian Romanick wrote:
Sven Luther wrote:
I think that ATI is missing something here. I believe that Powerpc hardware with ATI graphics represent a ever growing linux installed
base, with the G5 Powermac, with the new powerbooks, as well as with
non-apple powerpc boxes like the pegasos motherboards. But then, it is
probably that the ATI drivers are not endian clean, and that they can't
be bothered to make a powerpc build, even an unsupported one, probably
because of that, or maybe for some hidden reason like the intel-ATI
connection or something such.
Even if it is "ever growing", it probably still only represents 1% of 1% of their total market. It would take some pretty extreme dedication to the Linux movment to make a business case to devote even an single engineer to that cause. :(
Whatever. The truth is that outside of x86, there is actually not a single graphic card vendor with recent graphic card which provide 3D driver support. Until something changes, this mean the death of 3D support on non x86 linux.
Agreed.
And then, seriously, do you believe it it will need a full time engineer to make a powerpc build ? If the drivers were endian clean, then it would only be a matter of launching a build, and track the occasional arch related problem. Hell, if a volunteer project can make it, why can't ATI ? And i would do it, if ATI would give me access to the needed sources, under strong NDA or whatever, i would build their drivers, but they don't want to. Chances of Nvidia releasing powerpc binaries are worse even, altough it is possible that their drivers are more endianess clean, if they share the code with the OS X driver, which i know ATI does not.
I think the endianess issue is minor. There's probably lots of assembly code in various parts of the driver. The driver may also have some software fallback cases for vertex programs that generate x86 machine code instead of code for the GPU (pure speculation). If the driver was not written with other architectures in mind, it is very likely that there's way more to it than just kicking off a build.
The only real hope is that ATI will release the R300 specs once the R400 is released, but even there, i only half believe it.
Agreed 100% on both counts. :(
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