Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2000 13:34:34 +0100 From: Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org> To: Steve Hocking <shocking@hstn.tensor.pgs.com> Cc: multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: NVidia & VA closed source OpenGL Message-ID: <20000124133434.A84307@cons.org> In-Reply-To: <200001201619.KAA24706@prg01.hstn.tensor.pgs.com>; from Steve Hocking on Thu, Jan 20, 2000 at 10:19:51AM -0600 References: <200001201619.KAA24706@prg01.hstn.tensor.pgs.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
In <200001201619.KAA24706@prg01.hstn.tensor.pgs.com>, Steve Hocking wrote: > Is anyone else feeling rather snaky about this announcement? I'm rather cross > after having bought a TNT2U because of their previous release of a rather > limited open source GLX driver. Has anyone else ported the Voodoo 3 DRI stuff > over to FreeBSD yet? Or failing that, I guess I could buy myself a G400. For me, the situation is clear: Nvidia does not provide documentation to improve the sources they delivered and it seems they will also put effort into building a closed-source port of SGI's own OpenGL. Even if it was OpenSource, you would still into the problem of missing documentatition. The first consequence is that the G-400 (and maybe 3dfx) look much better in the long term. The second consequence is that many of the best people in the OpenSource OpenGL community jumped on the G-400 as a result of consequence 1), amoung them John Carmack. The people we're talking about here aren't just zealots that refuse to use Windows. Johnc at least is involved because he wants a better OpenGL than the Windows driver any consumer 3d card vendor delivers. He wants control and he wants at least one card pushed to the max. I bought a G-400 10 days ago... I think this is a bit unfair against 3dfx, who gave out the documentation as well. But they're behind in the GLX/DRI area and I think this will be the case for some time, since someone else will have to clean up a some messy bits. I.e. the fact that each glide shared lib is for just one generation of cards and that newer glide APIs aren't available for older cards. OpenSource people will pretty much require one does-it-all package to start with and someone will have to build it first. Martin -- %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org> http://www.cons.org/cracauer/ BSD User Group Hamburg, Germany http://www.bsdhh.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-multimedia" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20000124133434.A84307>