russell aspinwall wrote:
> Hi Alan,
>
> Is this article about ATI releasing 3D acceleration information about an old
> card or is this the card that is embedded is servers?
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/10/20/ati_brings_rage_3d_acceleration/
In graphics card terms, 1999 is very ancient history. Servers don't even
embed Rage chipsets anymore - I don't think any were ever made that were
compliant with the EU's Reduction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) requirements
for all products sold after 2006. The ATI chipset used in servers now is
mainly the ES-1000 (based on the 2-D core of the Radeon 7000).
ATI's 3D graphics for most of the last decade has been the Radeon series.
They have in recent years released a very large amount of specifications
for that, and helped the open source community produce & improve the Xorg
and Linux kernel drivers.
The obstacle to ATI graphics acceleration is not lack of information, but
lack of people porting the open code from the Linux kernel to the
OpenSolaris kernel - this is an area that's always been open to the community
to work on, but no one with the skills to work on kernel drivers has been
willing to contribute the time, and it's been lower on Sun's priority list,
since all the graphics sold in Sun computers & the OpenSolaris Toshiba laptops
are already covered by the Nvidia & Intel drivers.
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
