--- Ian Romanick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Let's see, XFree86 supports 2D for about 50 > different chips, and it > supports 3D for about 5. MS might be in a position > to cast way support > for older hardware, but I don't think that we are. > This is backwards thinking. In five years a Radeon 9700 is going to cost $10 and be integrated into the motherboard.
The forward looking view is to use mesa to fill in 3D support on the older 2D cards. By doing this apps and window managers can be written that assume the availability of 3D support. 3D support in not pervasive in Linux because general purpose apps never know if it is going to be there or not therefore they don't use it. There is much more to this than 3D eye candy effects. The 3D hardware is perfectly capable of rendering 2D graphics. 3D hardware includes alpha channel hardware and the new pixel shading engines. The pixel shading engines may have potential for doing better display of text. 3D hardware also knows how to do DMA on it's own. I'm sure the chip experts can come up with hundreds of reasons why the 3D hardware is better. The core observation is that X is a 3D system layered on top of a 2D one. In the long run we might be better off turning it into a 2D one layered on top of a 3D base. ===== Jon Smirl [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more http://taxes.yahoo.com/ ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
