On Thu, 16 Feb 2006, Michel [ISO-8859-1] D?nzer wrote:
On Thu, 2006-02-16 at 10:02 +0100, Michel D??nzer wrote:
On Thu, 2006-02-16 at 00:52 -0500, Vladimir Dergachev wrote:
If X1600 is a completely new chip then it is likely we are not going to
get any documentation within 1.5-2 years from the release. This has been
so with all of ATI's new chips: mach64, rage128, radeon, Rage Theatre,
Rage Theatre 200.
The only exceptions were, I believe, 2d support for rage128 and radeon
cards - and that turned out to be very similar to mach64.
Actually, AFAIR all of Rage128, R100 and R200 had pretty decent support
including rather shortly after release, [...]
I meant to say 'including 3D'.
3d support was Rage128, R100 and R200 was done by Precision Insight and I
distinctly remember working on TV-in of AIW Rage128 card while the card
had no 3d drivers (I would have noticed as I looked at all the
information sources that were publicly available to compliment ATI's
documentation). This was, of course, after the release.
R200 initial 3d support was done, AFAIK, by Kevin Martin, and involved
using R100 code - thus it did not support T&L.
I am somewhat hazy on timing for Radeons.
My estimate of 1.5-2 years delay before open source drivers appear is
based on a simple consideration:
0 - product is released
+1 year - ATI releases register specs to some developers under NDA
+1.5 years - stable 2d driver with decent acceleration appears
+2 years - 3d driver with at least triangles and textures appears.
The development times increase if the chip can easily lockup when
having unexpected values into registers (like what happens with 3d
pipeline on Radeon 9800)
I am not sure what the development timeline of ATI binary driver is but I
assume it is at least 3 months for a new chip or they would not need more
than one person.
best
Vladimir Dergachev
--
Earthling Michel D??nzer | Debian (powerpc), X and DRI developer
Libre software enthusiast | http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=daenzer
