On Tue, 9 Apr 2002, at 9:59pm, Paul Iadonisi wrote:
> I'm perfectly willing to accept that this is probably true, but then what
> does this mean from the xfree86.org site about driver status for this
> card? --
[...]
> It's identical for 4.1.0 as well. Looks like it's *supposed to be*
> accelerated.
"Accelerated" can mean many things. In this case, I am fairly certain the
XFree docs refer to 2D acceleration, not 3D/OpenGL acceleration.
A bit of background (I do love to wax historic):
The earliest (IBM-PC) video adapters were little more than some memory and
a RAMDAC; they had no onboard processing capabilities [1]. Any time you did
anything to the screen (be it drawing a box or moving the mouse cursor), you
had to move the bits around in the frame buffer yourself.
Enter MS-Windows 3.0. It was the first really popular GUI for the IBM-PC.
All those bitblits became a serious drain on the system. So "accelerated"
cards became available (for the IBM-PC). These cards could accept commands
like "draw a box here" or "the mouse cursor looks like this; overlay it on
the screen here". The CPU was free to do other things while those commands
executed on the card itself.
When the XFree docs refer to acceleration, they are generally referring to
that kind of acceleration. As anyone who has ever had to turn those
features off to work around bugs can say, they make a big difference. But
they do not help OpenGL much, if at all.
Footnotes
---------
[1] Actually, they had a BIOS (firmware), too. But from the standpoint
of the system, the BIOS is a separate function of the card. The
fact that the BIOS on the card drives the display functions on the
same card is not a requirement.
--
Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not |
| necessarily represent the views or policy of any other person, entity or |
| organization. All information is provided without warranty of any kind. |
*****************************************************************
To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body.
*****************************************************************
