On top of that, they have basically denied access to features on
their cards which are already becoming required in new games such
as hardware transform and lighting. The only reason anyone can
rightly try to support ATI right now is that ATI has released SOME
of their hardware specs for the purposes of open drivers.Reminds a bit of the initial situation with Creative and the Live!
cards (cripled DSP code w/o source + Open Source driver), although I
think most (all?) info is available now, along with an EMU10k1 DSP
assembler. No DSP code available, though, so still no serious DSP FX
on Linux. (In fact, the card is just another SoundFont player on
Linux - a good one with 8 point interpolation and 64 voices, but
still…)Don’t kid yourself - there is no SoundFont support in the SBLive
drivers at this time.
People have been using SoundFonts on the Live! for quite some time -
although that’s with the ALSA drivers. The kernel drivers may not support
it, and I’m pretty sure Creative didn’t help much when it comes to
SoundFonts.
The Gateway OEM version of the SBLive has shared
digital and analog jack which to this day cannot be toggled to digital
mode (and the card was sold with digital-only speakers!),
Not possible with ALSA either?
and we have absolutely nothing from Creative on the Audigy at all.
Yeah, I know. Unfortunately, one of my Live! cards (a Platinum) died a
while ago, and the only replacement I could get was an Audigy Platinum.
I’ll just put it in the Win98 machine for now… :-/
Creative is being pretty hostile toward Linux lately. Lip service
toward supporting open development, but the contact guy we have for
Creative is having an increasingly difficult time convincing anyone
that Linux is at all important to Creative’s strategies when they’re
basically not giving us basic access to their hardware in Linux… No,
to say that they’re a supporter of Linux is by far a stretch. To say
that they’re a supporter of free software or the open source model is a
bald-faced lie. They did what they had to do in orderto help seal
Aureal’s fate and then we didn’t matter to them anymore. Simple as
that.
Which means that the guys that flamed the Creative folks (and were more
or less counter-flamed by other list members as a result) on the ALSA
list were right. That’s the one conclusion no one wanted to draw.
But at
least the drivers work on most systems and the company is actually
trying to make sure their stuff works in Linux for most people.
They are of course totally clueless about the benefits of free
software at the moment, and that’s a shame.Not that it’s really an excuse (ever heard about reverse engineering
with disassemblers?), but they seem to have the same “problem” as
Creative with the EMU10k1 - the product is as much microcode as it is
hardware, and publishing the microcode source would "give away"
intellectual property.NVidia says the problem is that it has licensed some of that IP and
they legally can’t give it away.
Yeah, heard that one.
There was talk of opening up NVidia’s
unified driver model to the DRI people, but their unified driver model
didn’t fit into Precision Insight’s DRM/DRI model and basically it went
nowhere.
Nothing “fits” unless you let a sufficient number of motivated hackers
look at it. Obviously, the DRM/DRI “crew” isn’t a sufficient number of
hackers, and/or the NDA-like restrictions killed too much of the
motivation.
Still, we could have a nice and reasonably stable open driver
had that info been released. As much as I understand it, Precision
Insight said it was useless to them, so it’s still closed.
Weird. It doesn’t make sense - but then again, that’s not the first time
something like that happens…
The Linux
drivers NVidia puts out use it and my brother’s TNT2 using it can
pretty much keep pace with the DRI driver for any consumer-based card
on the market, and that includes the Radeon.I have seen a dual AGP main board, though, so there might still be
hope.
I would like one of those.
I think it was some big dual processor workstation main board.
Makes sense, as CAD systems and the like are often dual head systems.
Perhaps this was meant exactly for what we want: good 2D card + good 3D
card in the same machine, except that the dual head part isn’t a top
priority for me. (I’d have to get another F980 - looking at a "normal"
monitor next to an F980 is next to ridiculous…! 
Without a fair bit more cash and a bigger monitor than even my 21",
I can’t help much more than that.Actually, I’ve looked at real high end cards as well, but I have to
say I was rather disappointed. No solution there, regardless of the
astronomic price tags. Even monsters like the Wildcat stop at
1600x1200, or at best 1920x1440. (Besides, you can’t even buy a
Wildcat separately, as it’s a 3 layer deck of cards, that need 110
Watts, and won’t run in any standard case! But it seems to be pretty
fast… heh)Just be careful not to shuffle the Wildcat.
Yeah, that would be one expensive firework!
They all use 300 MHz RAMDACs (standard part, or what?) - while the
G400 has a 360 Mhz one that actually delivers. (As opposed to the
nVidia’s with their fake “360 MHz”. What’s the spec; -40 dB @ 360
MHz…?NVidia’s spec sheets are ridiculous. They’re guilty of playing the
paper numbers game, definitely. So is most everyone else at one thing
or another though, chalk it up to corporate ethics in a capitalist
society or something. But their drivers basically work more often than
DRI does and they’re faster to boot. They could be open, they should
be open, and they’d probably be a lot more stable if they were open.
They aren’t though, and we can, should, and will continue to ask for
that to change.
It will be easier as Linux grows stronger and more important - so perhaps
it’s time we whine less and hack more! 
I can’t use a high enough resolution to care that their RAMDAC
basically sucks and would basically prefer to go with a digital display
anyway if quality really matters.
I’ve looked at various LCD panels, but the resolutions are way too low
for my taste, even on the most expensive ones, with the possible
exception of Apple’s high end one - but that costs twice as much as the
F980! heh
I like Apple’s and don’t mind that I
need an extra adapter to use it with a PC, but I’d really like
something with an auxilary SVGA input for connecting up DVD players and
game consoles to. My monitor serves as a TV as well. That’s not
unreasonable for a 21" CRT and definitely not for a 24" 16x10 aspect
Isn’t it 16/9, if it’s a standard format…?
LCD panel either. =)
Well, either beats our current telly in all respects! (The old 28"er
was killed by the same power surge that took out about 50% of my computer
system, so we don’t even have a normal TV right now… heh)
//David Olofson — Programmer, Reologica Instruments AB
.- M A I A -------------------------------------------------.
| Multimedia Application Integration Architecture |
| A Free/Open Source Plugin API for Professional Multimedia |
----------------------------> http://www.linuxdj.com/maia -' .- David Olofson -------------------------------------------. | Audio Hacker - Open Source Advocate - Singer - Songwriter |-------------------------------------> http://olofson.net -'On Thursday 08 November 2001 06:11, Joseph Carter wrote:
On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 04:41:22AM +0100, David Olofson wrote:
