> The FireGL card is basically the same as the 7500/7800 with > some modification > to enable it to perform much faster then the 7500/7800.
As i wrote elsewhere, the 8xxx series is based all on similar chips. (similar means that the hardware feature subset is compareable.) Its the so calle Radeon 2. In contrast to this, the 7500 was called i.e. by tomshardware.com a "tuned" Radeon 1 which was die shrinked to 0.15 micron process. The site told that the chip is targeted at the GF3MX level. I think its clear to you that the recently announced (at comdex) 8700/8800 boards do have highest priority. When anything turns out to be stable, it might be worth a look for the smaller ones. The upcoming FireGL boards are Radeon 2 based. There are a differences to the predessor chips series, the Radeon 1, which would need a relatively unknown amount of effort in order to solve it. But i am just unsure if management is willing to pay for such. Maybe they could see a bright glow, if the thing shows out to be feasible with really low effort and fund it. Or maybe there is a way to do it in this comercial environment but without any funding and no time assignment at all in the form of a rather private and "experimental" approach. Sounds to me like this is sort of development process would be a tiny bit new, but unless it got tried there's no reason for me to assume that this approach might fail. > So basically the FireGL driver can be with some very minor > modifications work with the 7500/7800 based cards. No, different basic chip. But results on the FireGL 8xxxx might be of help to solve the needs for high speed (as fast as Windows) OpenGL even for the still missing OpenGL/Linux support on the 7500. > Currently (and people - please correct me if I'm wrong) the > Linux drivers > through DRI are not even close in performance compared to > ATI's drivers in > Windows 2k/XP/9X - and as a potential customer - I do expect > a company like > ATI to provide me with the fastest drivers to really use my card. Remember OS/2, BeOS and Win3.11 - some things did vanish by itself. For Linux its different. It wont vanish. And it was the common denominator between the various Unix flavours just because the GNU compiler and much other reasons. That was enough reason to start development for what you can get today. Now the road gets paved better every day and the vehicles to drive on it will get built just because the road is good enough for them. Since the concept prooved, its pretty likely that this trend will go mainstream. We are all still somewhere in the middle of a development process. And this process hopefully wont stop suddenly. But i myself think that this process will produce noteworthy results in next time, i think regardless of individual requests. Anyways, at a specific point in time such requests were neccessary and helpful. Nowadays the process is running at good speed and nobody reasonalbe could try to doubt about it. > If I recall correctly, ATI didn't re-hire PI/VA to write the > Linux drivers > for the 7500/7800 cards and ATI said before that they are > written in-house.. (And again, i think its the 8xxx and the Radeon 2.) The world outside talks gnu-ish and in order to talk to the world for showing the things are good (Linux prooven) there was no other way than making things alive in this language. Hey, here is your requested proof - the rest will come as the process does advance. Software development has always been a major question of time. And you know its big software. > So Alex, since I assume you work at ATI (at least according > to your email address) - could you ask for the official > stance of the drivers regarding the > 7500/7800? status about them? I hardly belive that telling > people about those drivers will violate any NDA. The 7800 as a mobility is only announced for about Q1/2002, as i read myself on www.heise.de recently. I dont doubt this but at presence i dont know much more about it. For now i am not worried about lack of general Linux support for this device because i expect it to be there as for the remainders. I will think about your idea on an talkback to some one or two persons that might have a clue on the 7500 and Linux. But as you you can see in the upper half, there are other rather highly interesting things that i possibly could do just for my own fun and in my sparetime. This could happen regardless if it gets a real comercial development target. > Thanks, > -- > Hetz Ben Hamo > [EMAIL PROTECTED] Regards, Alex. _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
