On Mon, Apr 01, 2002 at 02:43:00PM -0800, Andy Ross wrote: > Simon Fowler wrote: > > Andy Ross wrote: > > > All that being said, I'd be curious as you how your experience is with > > > the XiG drivers. These provide the only useful Radeon support for > > > Linux, right now, and are rather reasonably priced. > > > > The DRI Radeon drivers aren't useful? They work nicely for me . . . > > Correct me if I'm wrong, but the last time I checked the DRI driver > lacked support for the (now almost a year old) 8500 cards, had no > hardware geometry acceleration, nor multitexture support. These might > "work", in the sense of producing correct results, but they are only > semi-complete at best. Performance-wise, ATIs windows drivers stomp > all over them. Whether that consitutes "useful" or not depends on > your perspective, I guess. I should have picked a better term. > The 8500 support is currently non-existant, yes, but tcl support is available for the original Radeon chips, and I believe multitexture support is likewise available, at least in the DRI cvs tree (which is quite easy to install and use - certainly no harder than dealing with FlightGear/SimGear/plib cvs trees). There are also binary snapshots of the latest development code available.
Support for the 8500 /is/ planned - the docs are available, and the reason there's no support yet is because the developers are working on getting tcl support for the original Radeon working properly. This includes developing the framework for hardware tcl support, so that supporting the full feature set of the 8500 (and in fact /any/ chip that supports hardware tcl and similar) should be much easier. <rant> As for a comparison with ATI's windows drivers . . . . . How many man-hours has gone into them? Over how many years? Compared to about three people working on the DRI code intermittently over the last couple of years . . . At least they have full documentation now. You might as well say that FlightGear isn't useful, because it doesn't have everything that Fly! does . . . </rant> Yes, the DRI drivers are a work in progress, but at present they /do/ work, and they certainly work well enough that I'd choose to use them rather than fork out cash for binary drivers. > The Xi Graphics folks at least claim to support the full feature set > of the cards. I was curious as to how well it worked. > They also ship with a broken gl.h, apparently . . . What that suggests about their quality control is left as an exercise for the reader. Simon -- PGP public key Id 0x144A991C, or ftp://bg77.anu.edu.au/pub/himi/himi.asc (crappy) Homepage: http://bg77.anu.edu.au doe #237 (see http://www.lemuria.org/DeCSS) My DeCSS mirror: ftp://bg77.anu.edu.au/pub/mirrors/css/
msg04777/pgp00000.pgp
Description: PGP signature
