Re: Re: "Drivers? We don't need no stinking..."

Vladimir Dergachev <[email protected]> wrote:

> You are wrong on two counts:

Actually my opinion on this matter comes direct from conversations I had 
with ATI developers at the ATI mojo day. So although it is my opinion, it 
is based on stuff that I was told directly by ATI.

>        1. There are quite a few people knowledgable about ATI hardware

Probably.

>        2. ATI does provide documentation - which, in my opinion, has
>           improved a lot. They have also switched their SDK to be
>           Linux based (and not DOS/Watcom)

They did all that back for the earlier chipsets. For the Radeon 9700 
family they are only releasing the XFree86 2D only driver and are not 
providing any Open Source 3D driver source code. I also do not believe 
they are providing any 3D specs outside of NDA either for the later 
chipsets.

> Their binary drivers appear to be compiled versions of the SDK - though I
> am not certain abou this.

Nope, not for the latest Radeon 9700 family of drivers. They are all 
based on closed source versions of their Windows driver OpenGL layers. I 
was also told that the 2D components are also separate and not the same 
as the open source versions they provide to XFree86 (much like NVIDIA's 
binary drivers are completely different source even for the 2D side than 
what they have in the open source version).

Regards,

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Kendall Bennett
Chief Executive Officer
SciTech Software, Inc.
Phone: (530) 894 8400
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