[SDL] Radeon 7500/8500 Support

[Joseph Carter]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2002 at 03:51:41PM -0500, Patrick McFarland wrote:
> Er, wrong. Joe, you're thinking 8500. 8500 doesnt work right. 7500 works fine,
> its an overclocked VE. Literally. Raedon 1 chip, not the Raedon 2 chip
> that are in 8500s. Also, Ill offically say, stay away from nvidia on linux.
> <insert closed source driver and bad performance rant here>

*donning asbestos shorts*

The closed source driver is Precision Insight's fault, not NVIDIA's.  The
needed specs were offered.  And the offer was rejected because the specs
NVIDIA offered wouldn't have fit within the DRI framework.  DRI assumes
that you're always going to be writing to the bare registers.  You never
do that with any of the NVIDIA cards, you use the unified architecture,
which is higher-level.

While the drivers have a number of really annoying bugs (especially Xvideo
issues), NVIDIA cannot be faulted for refusing to give up specs for their
cards.  They were willing to give up exactly what they give to their own
driver programmers.  That wasn't good enough.


Clearly the DRI people have been taking lessons in negotiation from RMS.
Regardless of whether what they're offering is good enough, if it's not
what you want, call it unacceptable.  If they cave, you win.

If they don't, shout out to everyone that they're an immoral corporation
who is trying to hurt free software.  Most corporations cannot afford the
amount of damage to their appearance of professionalism getting into a
shouting match with someone questioning the morals of their business
practices, so they will ignore it.  Of course, people automatically assume
that an unanswered accusation is probably true, so you win anyway.

I suppose there will be at least a dozen replies to this demanding me to
take back what I've said about the "creator" of free software, accusing me
of all sorts of heresies.  All I can say is the ends do NOT justify the
means by any stretch of the imagination.  But that won't stop many of you
from flaming, so please do it off list.  =p

-- 
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd at bluecherry.net>              glDisable (DX8_CRAP);
 
"They are both businesses - if you have given them enough money, I'm
sure they'll do whatever the hell you ask:->"
        -- David Welton

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