On Thu, 2003-04-03 at 16:31, Shawn wrote: > ATi doesn't seem to want to support the Open Source community either > with the 9700/9800 on the 3d side of things. They've also refused to > give/sell the information to 3rd party driver manufacturers such as XiG. > If you want *real* 3d performance binary drivers are the only way to go > :( DRI is years away from the quality that the closed drivers have > reached both in terms of support and performance. > > -- > Shawn <drevil@xxxxxxxxxxxx> > http://www.warpcore.org/ The installed base of R300(ATI RADEON 9700/9500 ) is 1% on the "Users choice of GPU" at http://www.futuremark.com/community/halloffame/ The R200(ATI RADEON 8500/9100) is ATI's #1 installed card at 11%. An open source driver won't be successful without a good population of users willing to develop and test it. I just can't blame ATI for holding on to the specs for their latest generation of hardware when they have released a closed source driver, and there really isn't a large enough user base to support an R300 open source effort yet. Now that XFree 4.3 includes a usable R200 DRI driver, the number of users just skyrocketed. More eyes = Less bugs. IMO a high performance, quality driver will be available sooner than later. Perhaps when ATI releases their next gen R400, the DRI team will have access to R300 specs. A couple months after that I will buy my R300. :) Jim
