On Thu, 9 May 2002, Frank Van Damme wrote: >> Might not sound insane, but the bare fact is that it does not >> work in XFree86. I could care less personally if it ever does, >> as it is obsolete hardware. I only care that XFree86 does not >> crash. If nobody else is interested in fixing it either, then I >> believe the X/DRI sources should detect this problem and disable >> it by default as I have done, unless we now consider it ok for >> the X server to crash for no reason other than it being >> configured in a way that the drivers do not support currently. > >Not as obsolete as you think. Untill a few months ago I ran a voodoo3 3000
That depends on your definition of obsolete. Obsolete does not mean non-existant, nor not-in-use-anymore. Obsolete, means that the company that manufactures the product no longer supports it. In the case of the Voodoo hardware, it means that the company that used to manufacture the hardware does not exist anymore. Since they do not exist, there is no interest in anyone funding the development of this technology. As such, it is considered obsolete. That doesn't mean that you should throw away the hardware, nor that someone who has a personal interest in hacking on the drivers should not do so. I encourage anyone who is interested in hacking on the tdfx drivers to add support or fix bugs to go ahead and do so, and if I can help out in some way, I'll certainly try to answer any questions I can if I'm familiar with the particular area of inquiry. I'm sure any other developers would also be willing to help someone interested in hacking on X. Just keep in mind that while this is all perfectly good working hardware, that it is ultimately several generations old now compared to modern hardware, and that it is considered obsolete. >for playing quake which is bearable @ 920*7something. Still it >would make no sense to run it @1600*1200 (no question) so you're >using OR dri, OR desktop@1600*1200. Conclusion: no problem at >all. I agree with that. But some people out there do want to use 1600x1200 on such hardware that is 3 or more generations old. If the drivers were reprogrammed to actually work under those constraints, I believe the 3D would be so slow that software GL would not be much slower. Nonetheless, people want to do it if they can. As a general guideline of what is realistically possible with such hardware, one might try Windows, and see what 3D video modes are available on these cards in Windows while running a 3D game. Whatever windows can do with the 3Dfx drivers, it is theoretically possible that X can do also. However in addition to the problems in the current driver, there is an additional problem that XFree86 can't reclaim video memory used by 2D. Unless this has changed and slipped by me recently. I think if someone were to fix the drivers, that 1280x1024 might be possible, but I doubt much beyond that could run stable in 3D. -- Mike A. Harris Shipping/mailing address: OS Systems Engineer 190 Pittsburgh Ave., Sault Ste. Marie, XFree86 maintainer Ontario, Canada, P6C 5B3 Red Hat Inc. http://www.redhat.com ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris _______________________________________________ Xpert mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xpert
