On Tue, Jan 31, 2006 at 03:49:05PM +0000, A J Stiles wrote: > You know, if hardware manufacturers were obliged by law to release sufficient > information to enable a competent programmer to write a driver, we would not > be in this sorry mess in the first place.
That is no excuse for making a mess of the system setup to support said hardware when a better cleaner and accepted method exists. > It's my assertion that nVidia's secrecy is a smokescreen to disguise > something > they do not want the general public knowing; and my guess that the "low end" > cards could be converted to "high end" cards very simply by a person with the > right knowledge. But just the sheer volume of data that gets sent to a > graphics card makes reverse-engineering a daunting prospect. In some cases that is true. In most it is not. transistors are not free to put on a die, and the bigger the die the higher the chance of errors. Low end cards have smaller chips that are much less likely to not work when they make them, and they get more per waffer. They do certainly in some cases test a high end chip, find a defect in a pipeline or two, and turn off the broken pipelines and sell it as the lower part (ie turn a 24 pipe chip into a 20 pipe chip). If it doesn't run reliably at full clock speed, they test it at lower, and if it works, turn off the extra hardware that the lower part shouldn't have and ship it as such. This doesn't mean that a 4 pipeline part is the same as a 24 pipeline part. That would be much to wasteful, and there is a much bigger market for the low end parts than high end parts, so they make a lot more of the low end parts. Len Sorensen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]