On Sat, 16 Jun 2007 05:45:59 +0200 "Louise Hoffman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The reason I post is, I am wondering what the motivation is for doing > nVidia and not ATi? > > I have read the "FAQ:Why are you doing this?", but it doesn't mention > anything about ATi. > > Is nVidia easier to write drivers for, or do you think AMD will > release specs for their GPU's so it would be a waist for time, or are > you continuing on ATi, when the nVidia is done, or are ATi GPU's not > of interest? I have not written a single line into the driver, but I do watch the progress. I have heard that nvidia hardware is nicer to work with than ati. Nvidia cards actually tell you when you send illegal commands to them, instead of just crashing. And probably other things, too, that are different in the architecture. Like having hardware contexts for running multiple applications on the GPU concurrently and preventing them from messing with each other. I do not really know what is the ati side of these things, but this is the image I got. Some (most?) Nouveau core developers have worked on radeon drivers in the past. Of course, all the things I mentioned are nice, but I do not know how much they affect people's motivation. And due to nvidia architecture being more advanced in some respect, Nouveau is also pushing the development of the DRM and DRI systems on part. Will the Nouveau driver ever be "Done"? I think not, new cards come out all the time, and they have to be reverse-engineered. I do not believe ati will be any different in this respect. My personal motivation for helping Nouveau is that I happened to own an nvidia card, and got pissed at the proprietary driver. I did consider buying an ati card, but somehow never did that. Besides, there should be more than one 3D accelerator card manufacturer whose cards are supported by open drivers. ;-) (So far Intel has made only integrated accelerators.) -- Pekka "PQ" Paalanen http://www.iki.fi/pq/ _______________________________________________ Nouveau mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/nouveau
