Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 23 Oct 2004 19:02:58 +0200 | From | Rene Herman <> | Subject | Re: HARDWARE: Open-Source-Friendly Graphics Cards -- Viable? |
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Kevin Puetz wrote:
> Rene Herman wrote: > >>I'd actually prefer AMD, but the AMD market isn't offfering a solution >>comparable to Intel's integrated video. That means AMD and VIA and the >>like are loosing (some, mine at least :-) money since they don't have a >>graphics solution comparable to Intel, in terms of openness and >>basicness. I believe really only nForce and (to a degree; I hardly see >>it) ATI IGP are available in the AMD motherboard market. If you could >>produce something as good or better as Intel's, you might want to go >>talk to VIA, or AMD directly, and have them license it from you and >>massproduce it into their chipsets. > > > Well, there are the via k8m800 chipsets.
I see, must say I hadn't seen it before. Have basically stopped paying attention to VIA some time ago but read lately (mostly on this list, I believe) that they were actually getting better at opening up some things. When I just now checked, I see there's still not a datasheet in sight though. As far as I can see best I can hope for is that VIA would consider me "an appropriate open source developer" which, considering that I will not be developing for many things I still like to read the datasheets for, seems unlikely. But more to the point, even if it were likely, the competition here is developer.intel.com, not $RANDOMCORP's discretion.
From this, VIA seems a bit better than nVidia (if only because it would be hard to be worse) and comparable to ATI's developer program. Since I see that all the rest of their chipsets is equally undocumented, at least publicly, for me personally this means I will not be buying their products.
> That's (I believe?) a unichrome2 IGP, which should have opensource > DRI support via unichrome.sf.net (caveat - I have a unichrome1 in an > epia M1000, not the athlon64 variant). It's no hot-rod performer, but > it's good enough for tuxracer and neverball. I have no idea how it > really compares performance-wise to the intel stuff, but it does at > least have open drivers and reasonable GL acceleration.
I see from unichrome.sf.net that they are piecing together register info from drivers they got VIA to release...
Okay, so talking to VIA was a bad idea. AMD is good with documentation (looking at printed copies of the AMD 751/756 datasheets as we speak) but haven't been too interested in chipsets upto now. They generally do one or a few and lay off when VIA gets upto speed. Not having anything basic and open available _is_ driving some customers to Intel though, so maybe they're still interested in it for a basic chipset, with VIA for the gadget-add market.
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