On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Gerald Henriksen wrote: >>>I had a very elegant solution to this whole nVidia kernel driver issue. >>>I bought a Radeon 9000 Pro. :) >>> >>Let us know how it works - is 3D supported? >> >>I'd love to know of alternatives to nvidia for >>the linux gaming experience, simply for the >>reason that 3rd party binary drivers are sort >>of awkward when the kernel is upgraded - > >ATI has also found it necessary to release binary drivers for their >cards.
More accurately, ATI has had binary only drivers for their high end FireGL line of workstation video hardware for quite some time. These drivers were for the FireGL 8700 and 8800. Since the Radeon 8500 is the exact same chip as the FireGL, only running at a lower clock speed. >From what I understand, ATI added support for the Radeon 8500 due to frequent feedback from people requesting that it be added, since it basically amounts to nothing more than adding PCI IDs to the drivers. ATI did that, and since then has released new FireGL hardware (X1/Z1), and updated their binary drivers to support those cards as well. They have also allowed these FireGL drivers to also work with the Radeon 9700/9500/9000 series of cards as well again, since the main difference (in hardware) between the FireGL line, and the Radeon line, is merely clock speed, and amount of video memory present. In other words, ATI didn't "find it necessary" to release binary drivers, rather they simply enabled support for non-workstation hardware in their existing binary drivers due to customer requests. Now many ATI users have several choices - ATI's binary drivers, the open source DRI drivers, and the GATOS project's drivers. -- Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat -- Phoebe-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/phoebe-list
