21–28 of 28 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this relevant to the current 3d cards market ? I somehow doubt it.
It is relevant; people are "softmodding" GeForces into Quadros, theoretically costing Nvidia millions in revenue. Open-source drivers might make this even easier.
I feel like there has got to be a gotcha or two in there, but if not, this is great news. I wonder how much the proliferating netbook market is to blame for it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The business problem of open source 3D drivers lies not so much in secret know-how in the drivers but in this: http://steveblank.com/2009/04/16/supermac-war-story-7-buildi... High-end graphics cards tend to be exactly same as consumer level cards, save for few bits in some configuration memory that is used by driver to disable more advanced features/reduce performance.
Is this relevant to the current 3d cards market ? I somehow doubt it.
What companies do is use mass production for lowering the price not only of their low-end chips but high end too. They just disable and don't test the "advanced features" in low end cards.
With drivers you could enable it. Some blocks could be damaged(as it was not tested) but as a much lower price you just can buy new cheap ones.
I feel like there has got to be a gotcha or two in there, but if not, this is great news. I wonder how much the proliferating netbook market is to blame for it?
Wanna bet it's so they don't get left behind in the ChromeOS reference designs?
(I say "older," because my BCM4322 is such a chipset, and it's in my 15-month-old MacBook Pro. How is that "old?")
Regardless, whatever their motivations, it's a nice start. I wonder if they plan to collaborate with the guys working on the b43 driver at all. They support a ton of chipsets, and (at least from my perspective) the main deficiency is the not-yet-finished (partly due to the reverse-engineering effort being incomplete) N-PHY support for the 11n chipsets.
Great and all but "Linux drivers are not documentation"! All of FOSS is not Linux.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is relevant; people are "softmodding" GeForces into Quadros, theoretically costing Nvidia millions in revenue. Open-source drivers might make this even easier.
Do you have more details about this? Maybe a link or something.