Comments on: Phoronix XGI Volari Driver Review

By: ayqazi

ayqazi — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 15:46:01 +0000

I wish you’d mentioned in this news snippet that the testing team came to the conclusion THAT THERE IS NOT LINUX SUPPORT, SINCE THE DRIVERS DON’T INSTALL PROPERLY.

Would stop a lot of hopes being raised and then dashed afterwards.

By:

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 08:26:43 +0000

I like competition, and 3 can be better than 2, but normally one gets killed in a crossfire. It looks to me like ATI is pushing low power DX moble and NVIDIA is pushing high power OGL desktop, perhaps this comapny can hit the middle? As far as I am concerned if there was X.org/kernel open source 2D and 3D drivers available I would buy a card even if it was ~20% slower then an equally priced NVIDIA/ATi. As you can see I am not a hard core gamer…

By:

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 20:48:02 +0000

Last time I checked, the Volari is so slow, it isn’t even a remote threat for the big 2. It has more to do with the licensing. The MIT licence gives no incentive for proprietary vendor to open up the hardware specs, as clearly demonstrated by GPL game theory[1]. Game theory aside, it is possible that M$ have some secret NDA which prevents a hardware maker’s DirectX driver from being certified if certiain portion of it is opened up. Also, it is possible that someone wanted to sue XGI for using certain rendering technology, and opening up the specs give competitor an excuse to do so. After all, NVIDIA had been sued by 3dfx for using trilinear filtering before the latter went bankrupt…

From the looks of it, there will be no open source 2D driver. Video acceleration is already done by shaders in 3D core, and it is only a matter of time before 3D pipelines start emulating 2D routines. Longhorn and WGF2.0 already did that at API level.

[1] http://kanga.nu/Members/JCLawrence/docs/tech/OpenSourceAsESS.html