On 27 Feb 2008, at 19:24, matt hull wrote:
i not not a graphics card expert but have been told that current proprietary cards run initialization code on the host cpu during boot.
In theory, yes. For OGD1 currently no boot code exists but some will be available in the near future.
The boot code isn't really to initialise the card, but to make the system aware of it's presence. Essentially when you're executing certain BIOS interrupts you're not actually calling functions in the motherboard BIOS but code that has been provided by the graphics card. To get the card working without any driver support (from say, X) you'll need this bit of initialisation so you can use the 'standard' interrupt calls.
There is room for more than one BIOS in the card as well as methods in place to load these (in the PCI specification) so we can provide code for other platforms if people want this.
for example an nvidia for x86 will not work on a ppc g5 mac or the other way around since they run code on the cpu.
IMO this is purely for marketing reasons. Mike www.projectvga.org _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
